


and i may never see the light

by orphan_account



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Era, Grantaire-centric, M/M, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Vampire AU, drug use tw
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2016-11-18
Packaged: 2018-06-08 07:27:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 22
Words: 38,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6844882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>R's a vampire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The world is flickering like the view of a street through the spokes on a rolling carriage wheel when Grantaire is hauled out by his ear through the door of the Corinth by the very beautiful, very angry barmaid in the green-brown dress. He’s been referring to her as “Floreal” for the past three hours. This isn’t her name. When she get him outside, she releases his hot, sweaty ear and gives him a shove that she relishes.

“Oh, such cruelty I suffer!” Grantaire cries out as he tumbles to the cobblestones. Even as marinated in absinthe as it is, his body falls with an instinctual fluidity—he’s alley cat-like. He has an arm out in her direction, palm upturned like a Shakespearean actor. In his better moments, although she’d never admit it, the barmaid who isn’t named Floreal sometimes, disturbingly, finds him alluring.

“And yet at your hands I would suffer any cruelty—yes, your disdain bests any caress, ma chѐre—” Grantaire is purring.

But the barmaid snaps, “Home, mon pitre,” and slams the door, the welcoming yellow light of the Corinth disappearing with her.

Grantaire slumps back onto the street, disappointed. The stars in the sky, while he lies here on the cobblestones, are swimming, certainly, _reeling_ even, but they haven’t gone out yet, and this means that he is still awake. He resents Floreal for this.

He doesn’t know how long he lies there, halfheartedly wondering whether someone will gallop down the empty street on horseback and perhaps do him the courtesy of putting a hoof through his head before he can haul himself up, stumble home, and do a less effective, less permanent job with the bottle of brandy he has waiting—but eventually someone does come. He hears the clicking of their shoes and their cane before he sees them.

The man is a long, black shadow. He wears a top hat. His coat is cut in clean around his trim waist, but billows behind him when he walks like the train of a bride’s gown. His cane is white-tipped. This is how Grantaire remembers him later, anyway. He’s never sure, after this, whether this image stuck in his mind isn’t something from an illustration he’s seem; something from the cover of cheap paperback thriller, perhaps.

Something happens, then. Something strange. Maybe the man in the top hat with the long, billowing coat takes one stride forward and time and space adhere themselves to his will, bend around him, and bring him to Grantaire’s side in the span of a moment. Or maybe Grantaire just blacks out. Either way, the man is knelt beside him now, the soft silk of his glove, one finger, running down the side of Grantaire’s throat like a drop of water. And, for some reason, Grantaire doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything. His eyes are fixed, squinting, at the dark space where the man’s face is cloaked in shadow, the space under his top hat.

And then the man leans down and bites.


	2. Chapter 2

The first thing Grantaire’s aware of, afterwards, is the pain. There are thorny branches being dragged through his veins, and his skin is alive with searing heat, and his heart is not so much beating as it is shuddering, and he’s absolutely certain that he’s going to die.

He opens his eyes. There are the stars. The sky around them is gradually turning purple with the oncoming light of the sun about to rise.

His heart gives a _leap_ , like a frog caught inside a box, and he pushes himself up—everything inside of him protesting at the movement, making his stomach roil with nausea—to a sitting position, and then to a crouch. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe. Something is wrong. Everything is wrong. He’s about to die. He knows he is. He has to get out of here.

When he stands, he staggers to the left, catches himself on the wall of the Corinth, and—he keels with his palms flat on the brick and vomits. It takes a minute or so before his body settles to dry heaving, and he’s shuddering, blinking down at the puddle of sick. Because it’s not, actually a puddle of sick. It’s the unmistakable thick, dark red of fresh blood.

Grantaire’s eyes slide shut. He stands there for a long moment, breathing, feeling himself sway on the spot. He knew. He knew this day would come if he didn’t manage to end things first.

 _Joly_ , his brain begs him. _Joly_.

There are two options here. Joly is one of them. The other option is to walk on down the street, turn left, walk two blocks, find the Musain, and get too drunk to remember that he’s a drunk. A dying drunk.

Oh God, he’s dying. He’s—

He goes to Joly’s. He walks the two blocks with his arms clutched around his middle, trying to keep his face still, to keep his composure—but he’s Grantaire, he’s Grantaire and he’s never had composure and halfway there he begins to feel the itch of tears on his cheeks. He lets them continue to fall. Why die with dignity when you haven’t lived with it? And there’s no one on the street. It’s almost unearthly quiet, but it feels appropriate, like the lack of birdsong in a storm.

The sky is a faint, dusky grey when he arrives at the neat little brownstone that Joly and Bossuet share, and the little bit of light is enough to drive a spike of hot irritation back through Grantaire’s eyes and into his brain every time he blinks. He’s squinting as he climbs the well-swept stairs up to the familiar doorstep, which is flanked on either side by a little stone statue: one, a hummingbird drinking from a flower, and the other an eagle.

Grantaire unwraps an arm from his torso, heaves in a deep breath, and knocks. Moments later, he hears the sound of footsteps on the creaky floorboards, a pause, and then— _click, shhhhhclick, clunk_ —the three locks on the inside of the door are methodically drawn back. Joly opens the door with a lit candle in hand, wrapped up in a quilt that he seems to be naked beneath.

“Dear Lord,” he says, stepping forward instantly to steady to swaying Grantaire. Grantaire shuts his eyes at his touch, looking green.

_He can hear Joly’s heart beating in his chest._

“Come in,” Joly says, gently. “Come inside, now.”

And he’s steering his friend in, a hand wrapped around his waist. He pauses to lock the door—and then to unlock the door, and then to relock the door—before shaking his head, gritting his teeth and guiding Grantaire gently over to one of the amrchairs in the sitting room just off the hall.

Grantaire sags into it, a gasp knifing audibly in his throat. His eyes are still shut and, as Joly watches, he leans forward and presses his trembling hands over his mouth, over his nose. He looks—he looks like he’s trying to hold his breath.

Joly frowns. He squats down by the chair, putting his hand on Grantaire’s upper arm, but Grantaire flinches away. A muffled whimper escapes from beneath his hands.  

The room is so, so quiet.

“How much have you had to drink tonight, mon ami?” Joly asks.

Grantaire shakes his head.

“R, I wouldn’t ask, but I need to know, you understand. I want to help you.”

“Get—” Grantaire hisses out from behind his hands. His face is squeezed up, pulled into an expression of agony—and Joly’s heart is beating so hard, his neck is sweating into the quilt, his eyes are huge with dread.

“Get what?”

“Away. Get _away_ ,” Grantaire manages, one hand balling into a fist so tight that it looks like his knuckles might burst out through the skin.

Without question, though his instincts tell him otherwise, Joly stands and backs up to the fireplace. It’s terrible, terrifying to see Grantaire so serious, so forthright.

“What is it that you’re feeling?” he asks in the calmest voice he can manage. “Tell me all.”

Grantaire shakes his head again.

“Are you seeing things?”

“No.”

“Are you hearing things?”

Grantaire stiffens.

“R,” says Joly. “You are a dear friend to me, and I would never think the worse of you if—”

“I can hear your heartbeat,” Grantaire spits out, both hands in fists now, pressed to his temples. “I can hear your heartbeat, Joly. My friend. And it—I’m going mad. I think I’ve gone mad. I cannot—I oughtn’t breathe. I can _smell_ you…”

“When’s the last you had anything to drink?”

“Mere hours ago. Not that. Well, _yes_ , that, but—there was blood.”

Joly stills.

“Blood?”

“Joly, I can _smell_ you,” Grantaire cries, and his eyes are open now, wide and blue and pained, tears on his cheeks. His thin face is drawn long in an expression of confusion and horror, has mouth fallen open and—

Joly’s brow furrows. He takes a half-step forward before remember R’s request to stay away, and squats again, looking into his friend’s mouth.

Grantaire looks him up and down, blinking, waiting for a response that doesn’t come.

“May I come closer?” Joly asks.

“I—” Grantaire’s hands are scared, tight fists again. “No. I pray, don’t.”

“Draw up your lip, then.”

“My lip?”

“Your upper lip. Let me see your canine teeth.”

Grantaire obliges, slowly.

Where his canine teeth should be are, unmistakably, two long, hooked fangs.

Joly stumbles backwards so fast that he knocks down the rack that holds the pokers for the fire, sending them clattering to the brick hearth. He grabs the mantle to steady himself, every premature worry line on his face stretched in terror.

He crosses himself.

And Grantaire yelps like a dog who’s just been kicked, flinching backwards in the armchair hard enough that it rocks back on two feet. Joly watches as his eyes roll up into their sockets, showing their yellowy whites.

“Camille?” a voice asks from the doorway. “Are you alright?”

Bossuet. Bossuet—entirely naked—with the broken-out, emptied drawer of his nightstand clutched like a baton ready to swing, his bare feet spread on the floorboards.

Joly opens his mouth to respond. He closes it again. He blinks and shakes his head.

In the armchair, Grantaire is slumped backwards in shadow.

“Stay where you are, Juste,” Joly says to Bossuet, and then takes a step forward himself towards the chair. Another step. Another.

He kneels by Grantaire’s feet, careful not to touch him.

“Mon ami,” he says. “R.”

And it’s then that Grantaire springs forward, grabs Joly by the shoulders, and sinks his teeth deep into his throat. They slip clumsily past the right artery with a friction that Joly—pinned helplessly beneath him, no match at all for his strength—can _feel_ , and with a low, pulsing growl of frustration Grantaire pulls them out and makes to bite again.

That’s when Bossuet smacks him over the head with the drawer.

The drawer shatters to splinters over Grantaire’s skull, fragments of wood stuck in his dark curls as he falls sideways. He lands on the hardwood with his eyes closed. But his mouth is open, stained bright with Joly’s blood.

Joly stares.

“Oh my God,” Bossuet is saying. “Camille. Camille, are you alright? What the devil is—oh my God. Camille. I cannot— this is—Gran _taire_. Will he be—?”

“Yes. Help me up,” says Joly.

When Bossuet does, Joly draws himself into his chest, shivering. Bossuet’s arms are warm and thick, comforting, familiar. He breathes in the smell of him, the smell he’d know anywhere.

“He said… He said that he could smell me.”

“What?”

“He said that he could smell me,” Joly repeats. “He told me that he could hear my heartbeat from across the room. He didn’t want me nearby.”

“He’s obviously suffering some sort of… delusion. Haven’t you talked before of—?”

“No,” says Joly, plainly. His voice catches in his throat. “No, Juste. He has fangs.”

Bossuet is silent. He pulls back from their embrace to look at his partner’s face.

“Pardon me?”

“He has _fangs_. He bit me with them. He just missed my right carotid artery.”

Bossuet gives an incredulous little laugh.

“Mon lapin,” he says, “We have been somewhat intimate with Grantaire for nearly six years’ time and, in that time—if you will forgive me—I believe that one of us, if not, indeed, both of us, ought to have noticed should he have had _fangs_.”

“He hasn’t always,” says Joly, stepping away. He nudges his toe to point in the direction of Grantaire’s open mouth. “Yet he does now.”

Bossuet blinks.

“Why, yes,” he says, weakly. “Indeed he does.”


	3. Chapter 3

The place where Grantaire wakes is dark and warm and close. There are soft things—blankets—piled beneath him and one stretched over his back, which embarrasses him vaguely at first—where is he? Who has found him? Who has brought him home? What, in his drunkenness, did he say to them, and how will he face them now?—but upon sitting up, his head and neck brush fabric and the sound of clothing hangers on a rack chitters from above him. He’s in a closet.

He stands up, blinking in the darkness, the outlines of jackets and breeches and waistcoats coming into view—a man’s closet… no. No, no. He can smell them. He can hear them, he can sense them. One with wiry muscles and a heart that beats fast as a rabbit’s, the lingering smell of cocaine and disinfectant and fear, worry, flinching. The other broad and steady, the blood in his veins pulsing slow and self-effacing, all aftershave and leather and tobacco smoke.

Joly. Bossuet. Joly and Bossuet. Joly and Bossuet—he can smell them out in the hall. He can hear them out in the hall. He can—

Something in the bottom of his stomach breaks, and a sharp whine echoes around the closet. Everything inside of Grantaire is suddenly unbearably itchy. Every organ feels like it’s been coated in little cactus spines, brushing up against the next. His veins… his veins feel flattened, weak, like straws with clogs at the bottoms and—oh God, he’s so hungry. He’s going to die. He’s going to die. He’s going to—

“R? R, can you hear me?”

It’s Bossuet, standing two paces from the other side of the door, unbearably close, the smell of him—wet muscles; hot blood; strong, squidgy heart—coming under the crack at the bottom of the door. Grantaire, from far away, hears himself moan with frustration. There are splinters from the wooden door under his fingernails, and they ache, but he doesn’t care—he scratches again.

“R?”

Joly. Joly, Joly, Joly.

Grantaire whimpers.

“R, you made an attack on me. Do you remember that?”

Does he remember that? No, he doesn’t remember that. He doesn’t remember anything. Only now. Only right now and the horrible want, the horrible wanting, wanting.

“Oh my God,” he’s saying aloud. “Joly. Joly, I’m going to die.”

“No, no, mon ami. You’re not going to die. We wouldn’t allow such a thing,” says Joly.

“I need—” Grantaire manages, and then his voice devolves into a sorrowful little whine.

“Shh, shh,” murmurs Bossuet. “It’s alright, now.”

The smell of fear and concern and love are coming from the hall, coming from under the door, and this comforts Grantaire more than anything either of them could say. They care. They care. Why do they care? Why—but he knows they do. He knows that they know that he’s in pain. And he’s in an awful lot of pain.

“What’s wrong with me, Joly?” he cries.

There is quiet behind the door for a moment.

“Do you remember anything of what happened?” Joly’s voice asks.

Grantaire struggles to reign in his mind, to think. The fingernails on his right hand are dug deep into the wood of the door, and fingernails on his left are pressed into his cheek so hard that their points of entry have gone numb. He’s shaking. He’s _starving_. He’s—

“A man. A man in a top hat,” he says. “Joly, please let me out.”

“In a moment, R,” says Joly. “The man in the top hat. Who was he? What happened?”

A man in a top hat. His coat billowing behind him. The click-click of his shoes. The streetlamps. The stars swimming.

“He bit me.”

Grantaire can hear Bossuet tense up. He can hear the pull of his muscles tightening.

Joly’s racing heart misses one of its pulses.

“And what do you feel now, R?” It’s Bossuet. His voice is forcibly calm.

“I want to bite _you_.”

“Alright,” says Joly immediately. “Alright. Yes. Yes, of course. Alright.”

“This is absurd,” Grantaire hears Bossuet hiss under his breath. “This must be a gag he’s schemed up. Some sort of prank—”

“I’ll have you know that I have bite-marks in my throat!” Joly whispers back. “Even Grantaire would not—”

“I most certainly would not,” Grantaire growls, a spark of anger shaking him more fully awake. “You are no more frightened, dear eagle, than I. And I would hope you believe me less foolish than this.”

He spits out the nickname like a curse. Out in the hallway, Bossuet swallows.

“I… My apologies, mon ami. I simply cannot… I don’t want to believe that…”

“Perhaps it’s rabies,” Joly jumps in. “There have been cases of the transference of the disease from rats to humans. Perhaps if you fell asleep in the gutter…”

“You assume I fell asleep in the gutter.”

“Did you not?”

“I… did.”

“There are rats in the gutter.”

“Joly, mon chѐr, I can hear your _heart_. I… I am hungry for it. It is worse by a thousand times than what I’ve felt on those occasions yourself and ‘Ponine have taken it upon yourself to lock me up so that I might not drink. It is worse than wanting a drink, Joly. Until now—until now, I hadn’t found anything worse. I hadn’t found anything worse than wanting a drink. This is worse. I… I fully believe I will die if I don’t... Oh, Joly, this is…”

There are tears tracking their ways down Grantaire’s cheeks now there in the dark, squatted against the door, trying not to breathe for fear of the leaps that his heart and stomach keep giving at the smell of their blood.

“Please,” he says. “Please let me out.”

\---

Out in the hall, Joly has his hand pressed to his lips, white and shaking. Bossuet’s arm is around his shoulders.

“We cannot let him out,” Bossuet is breathing into Joly’s ear. “Whatever has come over him— Camille, he will wound us. He is stronger than either of us under normal circumstances.”

“We cannot let him die. I will not. He is our friend.”

“Yes, but now…”

“Now he is still our friend.” Joly’s eyes are wide and pleading. “Mon coeur, it is Grantaire.”

Bossuet looks at the door.

“I am frightened,” he says.

“As am I. As is he.”

“My mother raised me on tales of such beasts. There was a grave in our town which was marked with two boulders, one on top of the other, with crosses chiseled into all of its sides. It was purported that the… the vampire would rise when the moon was full and creep through the woods to the farms, where it would—”

Bossuet stops. He blinks.

“I’ve just had an idea,” he says.

\---

The marketplace opens at dawn. Joly dresses, combs his hair in the hallway mirror, and fills two syringes with a solution of morphine and water. One—the much stronger of the two—he tucks into Bossuet’s breast pocket and instructs him to use on Grantaire should he escape from the closet. He then sits down on the bench by the hat-stand, rolls up his sleeve, and empties the other into his own arm to steady the throbbing of his heart. Bossuet watches, shaking his head in mild disapproval.

Joly pecks him on the lips and leaves for the marketplace. The streets are quiet yet busy at this time of the morning: wives bustling past to the bakery or to the shops, men striding along on their ways to their workplaces, stray children and alley cats ducking around everywhere, peeking out at the passerby, an assortment of drunks and tramps wandering, looking sad and lost.

The marketplace is tucked around in the courtyard of a block that houses a few permanent shops. Joly walks in through the hall, feeling oddly anxious, as if the people around him can read on his face what it is that he’s hiding in his closet back at home, and what it is he’s buying for it. For _him_. For Grantaire.

He winds his way through the dun-colored stalls to an awning where a fat woman stands with her hands on her hips, glaring out at the rest of the market, a flurry of motion behind her.

“Mm,” she grunts, flicking her chin up in greeting when he approaches. “Morning.”

“Bonjour, madame,” says Joly, fingering his purse. He peers behind her into the darkened stalls. “Have you any goats?”

“Of course.”

“Bring me your largest one, please.”

\---

Joly has never been good with animals. They smell, and they eat anything and everything, and they shit while they walk, and they’re covered in flies, and they carry all sorts of diseases with them. Horrible diseases. Possibly deadly. So leading the big brown goat with the glassy eyes back to his brownstone while it clomps behind him making all manner of disgusting noises through its wet nose, the color of rotting trout, and gnawing away on the rope with its brown teeth—it isn’t Joly’s idea of a lovely morning, exactly. He tugs it up the stairs, pounds on the door until Bossuet can open it, drags the goat in, drops the rope with a shudder, and then bolts off to wash his hands in hydrogen peroxide. And his arms. And then—stripping his clothes and taking up a washcloth—his entire body. He does this three times. And then he drops his goat-covered clothes into the washbasin, wrings them out, hangs them over through the window to dry, and walks back out with the intention of re-dressing before he remembers that Grantaire is, of course, in the closet.

He wraps himself in a sheet again.

Bossuet is talking to Grantaire through the door, the goat’s lead held in his hand. The goat is idly licking at a spot on the floor, unaware of any imminent danger.

“…Camille will be upstairs in our bedroom, and I will let you out and then follow him. I have a syringe of morphine in my breast pocket…”

“Juste,” says Joly. “It ought to be I who stay.”

Bossuet looks back over his shoulder.

“Mon lapin, I am stronger, larger. I have a better chance of subduing him should he fight.”

“Yes, but I know Grantaire more intimately. He trusts me. I trust him. And I know best how to work the syringe, where to administer it—”

“Joly,” comes Grantaire’s voice, from behind the door. It is thin and hoarse and pained. “No. I prefer Bossuet stays. He is right. He is larger. I have already bitten you once.”

“You hardly broke the skin—”

“Camille.” Bossuet looks at him. “Go upstairs.”

Joly takes two steps forward, braving his way past the goat, and kneels behind Bossuet. He rests his chin on his shoulder, presses his lips to his cheek, and snakes his arms around his waist.

“I love you,” he says, quietly. “Please be careful.”

“I always am.”

“You are without a doubt the most accident-prone member of _homo sapiens sapiens_ that I have ever encountered in my twenty-three years of life. I truly believe that we ought to study your bloodline for individuals who may have been cursed by witches.”

Bossuet grins.

“I love you too,” he says. “Go upstairs.”

“Good luck, R,” Joly calls through the door, and then he stands up, runs a hand over Bossuet’s shoulder, and goes.

\---

It all happens in a flurry of fluttering pulses and itching teeth. The moment that the key turns in the lock, Grantaire’s body springs forward, battering the door open so fast that Bossuet is pinned against the wall behind it. This—although the doorknob slams straight into his groin, rendering him breathless and agonized—is quite lucky, in fact, because it means that the first living creature that Grantaire’s eyes land on is the goat.

His teeth are in its throat in less than a second, sinking through the flesh like brand-new steel knives. The goat is thrashing under him, kicking its hooves into his body, but he couldn’t care less: its blood is in his mouth, thick and hot and _alive_ in his throat and, God, it tastes better than expensive absinthe and two sugar cubes after five days dry; it tastes better than anything he’s ever had before, so good that he can feel tears running down his cheeks, he can hear himself moaning like the girls he’s fucked who have never had a tongue down in their nether regions before, who have only ever been rammed into hard and fast and over and over and—he bites down again, feeling the blood beginning too slow, sucking impatiently, and more of it wells up. His whole body feels warm. If, somehow, it were possible to not only fill one’s belly with wine, but one’s veins as well—but, no, it’s better. It’s like opium without the exhaustion, or like cocaine without the panic, or—like lying out in the sunlight, but with skin made of lace, so that every organ and every blood vessel comes alive in the light and sang.

He doesn’t know how long it takes to drain the goat. It could be months or seconds. But when he has, he’s lying beside it, looking up at the dark ceiling and panting, swollen like a tick, his waistcoat is straining against his full, warm stomach. He reaches up an arm, dizzy, giddy, more satiated than after any orgasm he’s had, and undoes the buttons. They spring open. He sighs, murmurs, “Oh God,” and lays a hand on his taut stomach—and only then does he begin to think about how utterly fucked-up this is.

The goat, lying beside him, is shriveled up like a dried fig, or like the mummified cat that Jehan has in his china cabinet.

He shuts his eyes and lies there on his back for a long while, breathing, thinking. He doesn’t like to think—he never has—because when he thinks, he thinks too much and too deeply, and it invariably is nearly enough to drive him to insanity, to drive him to fill his pockets with stones and walk into the Seine. But he can’t help it now.

He thinks about Joly and Bossuet. Good old Joly and Bossuet. Ever-faithful. Never judgmental, even when, perhaps, they ought to be. And now they definitely ought to be. They’re upstairs. They’re upstairs waiting, listening, and their hearts are beating—but that isn’t quite as painful anymore. He thinks that maybe, maybe he can stand it now. If he goes to them slowly. And if Bossuet keeps the syringe in his breast pocket.

He sits up, the contents of his stomach sloshing loudly, wonderfully, horribly. The body of the goat is there on the tiles. He feels himself flush red. This is worse, even, than the times he’s stumbled here dead drunk and covered in his own vomit, or bleeding from the wounds of the fight he’s gotten himself into, or begging Joly for something, anything, to get him to sleep. And they oughtn’t forgive him. They might not. He almost hopes that they don’t.

He gets up.

“Joly?” he calls, shakily. “Bossuet, my dear eagle? It’s finished.”


	4. Chapter 4

Things are different after that morning. Of course they are.

R takes up residence in the bedroom down the hall from Joly and Bossuet’s, the bedroom that everyone has always been meant to pretend belongs to Bossuet while in polite company. They will work out their new lie later, Bossuet says, smoothing down the pillow that he’s retrieved from Grantaire’s own, much smaller, rooms. His landlady has been informed that Monsieur Grantaire is taking a long holiday in Cannes. She is, Joly says, relieved by her scoundrel tenant’s absence. Grantaire doesn’t find this funny at all, but he laughs nevertheless.

The thing that no one seems to be discussing is the feeling of permanency that weighs on this arrangement. Grantaire cannot leave the brownstone. That much has been decided by the simple fact that he cannot touch Joly or Bossuet—can hardly bear to come within a yard’s length of two of his most intimate friends—without being sent into a spiral of dizzying hunger and bloodlust that has, twice now, been cause enough for the use of the sedatives in his friends’ pockets. He is constantly in a state of want and panic. To step outside, where innumerable strangers walk, would undoubtedly be an acceptance of the loss of the lives that his body wills him to take, and take endlessly.

He drapes his out-of-doors cloak as a second layer over the curtains in his new bedroom. He doesn’t need the cloak anymore, he probably never will, and the sunlight fills him with the horror that a crouching tiger would bring most people. He sleeps during the day.

In fact, he spends most of his time in bed, curled under the covers. If the taste of wine didn’t disgust him now, he would undoubtedly spend more of his time drinking himself to darkness than ever. He wants to. He misses it. But a sip, now, and he’s on his knees in front of the chamber pot, retching—and so he’s taken up with Joly’s morphine, using it whenever he can. He moves quietly when he wants to now, much more quietly than he’s ever moved before, and it’s very little effort to sneak to Joly’s bedside table in the night and take what he’ll need for the next day. Joly knows, of course, but doesn’t say anything. Grantaire doesn’t think he begrudges him for it. Joly smells like sadness and understanding every time he takes too long a look at Grantaire’s blown pupils.

They bring him a goat every night. They tether it downstairs in the hall before they go to bed and, in the morning, take its dried body out to the street. Joly has told the neighbors that he’s doing medical experiments for his classes at the university. They believe him.

Every morning is the same. Every night is the same. Maybe it always will be.

And, though Grantaire wouldn’t admit it aloud for fear that Joly and Bossuet would stop attending the meetings on his behalf, the worst nights are Wednesday nights. Wednesday nights, when Joly and Bossuet return home late, smelling of the Musain and of wine and of their friends. Of the club. Of Les Amis. Of Enjolras. Enjolras, whom Grantaire has missed two Wednesdays in a row. Enjolras, who probably doesn’t notice Grantaire’s absence. Enjolras, who won’t be a student forever, who won’t be in Paris forever. Enjolras, who is precious and fleeting. And Grantaire is missing him. Grantaire may never see him again. And no one will notice.

Things go on. The world spins. Grantaire lives through endless cycles of drugged despair, hunger, relief, and shame. Joly and Bossuet live with a monster in their guest bedroom, a monster who wears the body of an old friend.

After more than two weeks of this, Grantaire comes down the stairs while Joly and Bossuet are eating breakfast. He can hear them, feel them looking at one another as they hear his footsteps on the stairs.

Grantaire shies away from the patch of sunlight coming through the door in the hall, wincing even through the heavy clothes he’s donned and the sheets he’s layered over his face. He rounds the corner and comes into the kitchen, where everything looks too bright, too real, too colorful. It smells like toast and eggs and sausage links.

Joly begins to get up, concerned, as the sheet-cloaked figure walks into the room, looking like a child’s Halloween costume, but Grantaire merely passes by him and crosses the kitchen floor to close the curtains in front of both windows. Then he slumps down into one of the chairs at the table, taking the sheet off of his head of lank curls. The smell of food—real food, human food—makes him feel a bit sick.

“He awakens,” says Bossuet, laughing a little. “Good morning, R.”

Grantaire ignores this. His eyes are fixed somewhere down the table, bloodshot and purple-ringed.

“Mis amis, I’ve decided that I must die.”

Joly does get up now. His chair pulls back with a scrape that makes the other two flinch, and his palms land on the table so hard that milk slops out of Bossuet’s glass into his eggs.

“No,” he says. “No, Grantaire. I won’t allow it.”

“You won’t allow it,” Grantaire mocks. “You won’t allow it. As if there was anything you could do. As if there was anything either of you could disallow me from doing. I am stronger than the both of you; you’ve said so yourselves. And yet here I am, cloaked in bedsheets, frightened of the sun. Here I am, needing you to feed me, to care for me, to facilitate my survival. It’s absurd, Joly. It’s positively absurd, and I refuse to let this go on any longer. I am no more and no less than a murderous infant nowadays. Fragile and yet deadly. Fragile because of my deadliness. I present a danger to the both of you, I inconvenience you, I _disgust_ you—I see it, I see your eyes—and yet you cannot be rid of me because doing so would require either allowing me to leave—which I could do at any time, if I were not so mortified by the idea of leaving you with misplaced guilt, and if I had any desire, any _real_ desire, and desire in my heart and my soul rather than my body, to cause harm to anyone—well, you see, you cannot be rid of me unless you turn me loose _or_ , or, or, Joly, Bossuet, my dear friends, you kill me.”

He looks at them very plainly, breathing hard. His fists are clenched, nails digging into his palms—this is the closest, physically, that they’ve been to one another in a long time.

“I could never, Grantaire,” says Bossuet. “ I would never.”

“You must,” says Grantaire. And he’s pleading now, leaning forward—and then back again, when he catches Bossuet’s scent too strongly. His nostrils flare. He shuts his eyes. “You must. Please. I will beg you. I will get down on my knees and beg you if need be. I must die. I cannot live like this. This is not living. This is worse than death. You would helping me. You would be preventing future violence and death. You would be doing something righteous. No worse than Zeus in his defeat of Typhon. Although, of course, I say that only half-seriously, as I am certainly no Typhon. I am more of an Empousa than anyone else. But you, you could indeed be Zeus, Bossuet, my eagle—you have all of the strength, all of the wisdom—”

“Enough, Grantaire,” Joly spits. “Enough of this. You will not die. It is out of the question.”

“I will do it myself if I must.”

“And what will you do? Drive a wooden stake through your own heart?”

“Perhaps.”

Joly splutters.

“Shh, shh,” says Bossuet, reaching an arm across the table to quiet his more excitable companion and knocking the remainder of his milk out into his plate in the process. “The two of you together in one room have always been something like a pair of small, yapping dogs who’ve drunk too many shots of Italian espresso, and in our current situation, you both have grown even more frantically melodramatic. Settle down, now. R, you are not going to die and, Camille, you are not going to take his bait; he is merely telling us in his own horribly Romantic way that he is unhappy and at a loss for what to do about it.”

Joly is breathing hard with one hand massaging his chest, and Grantaire’s eyebrows are pinched together in the middle in a look of despair, but they are both watching Bossuet as if he’s a lecturer in a hall who’s just given them the solution to a particularly difficult equation.

“Stop taking my morphine,” Joly snaps across the table after a short pause. “It’s making you miserable and lethargic.”

“Psh," R snorts. "Only if you stop it with the incredible quantities of cocaine I see you do on a daily basis. It’s making you… _you_.”

“What the devil is that supposed to mean? Making me me? And I’ll have you know that countless medical journals have purported cocaine to be healthful and invigorating, a positive stimulant for aiding the blood vessels and for clearing the mind.”

“And I’ll have you know that countless _credible_ sources have disproven the existence of vampires, and yet here we are. My teeth are fangs. I can feel the beating of your, ahem, positively _racing_ heart. I have eaten nothing but goat’s blood for weeks and yet—” Grantaire grasps at his stomach. He has always been a bit on the stockier side, but now he can take two distinct handfuls of his belly, which strains back against the fabric of his undershirt when he lets it go. “—And, incidentally, the reason I have been making use of your morphine is that my own previous vices have gone unindulged because I can no longer bear to swallow a mouthful of wine. Me. I cannot drink wine. I am, therefore, a vampire.”

“Lord on high,” murmurs Bossuet, “deliver me from the company I’ve chosen.”

“I intend to,” says Grantaire. “Half of it, at least.”

“Oh, Grantaire… Talk to us of why you are so unhappy and perhaps we can help you. Perhaps there is something that we can do,” says Bossuet.

“There is nothing. I am a monster, an abomination before any choice of god, and any respectable man would put me to death.”

“Then it is a quite good thing you have fallen in with us heathens,” Bossuet says, shooting a quick wink across the table at Joly, who has sat down now and is biting at his cuticles.

 “You know, this really is all quite awful,” says Joly, quietly. “R is right.”

“I am?” asks Grantaire, blinking.

“Not about death; I will not put you to death. But about vampirism, yes. I can only imagine what you must be experiencing, having to creep about with a sheet over your head, unable to walk outside, unable to relax in the company your own friends for fear of injuring them, unable to eat, unable to _drink,_ living on goats’ blood. It must be a terrible existence.”

“The goats’ blood is quite nice, actually,” says Grantaire before he can stop himself. “But, yes. Yes, the rest of it. I… Thank you, Joly.”

“Of course, mon ami. And perhaps Juste is right as well. Perhaps there are ways to learn to live again.”

“I doubt it very much,” says R.

“Hear me out before you decide,” Joly says. “Perhaps it’s like training a dog—though of course I don’t compare you to a dog. You know what I… Right. But perhaps it’s merely a matter of re-wiring natural instincts. I believe you’re on the path already. For instance, that first morning, once the urges had really begun to present themselves fully, the only thing standing between you and tearing out my throat was the closet door. And yet, this morning, here we sit, hardly a meter away.”

“Yes, but it’s still difficult. It’s still… I don’t want to think of it or I’ll have to leave the room to control myself. If you were a stranger… God. Joly, please don’t remind me of these things. I’m very hungry.”

Grantaire kneads his face in his palms, trying not to breathe.

“Yes, of course,” says Joly. “Of course. But it’s still a measure of progress. Perhaps in another two weeks, I might be able to grasp your hand.”

“Perhaps,” says Grantaire, almost reluctantly. “But please don’t think to try it now.”

“I wouldn’t,” Joly assures him. “I’m merely saying that if we work at this, if we go by small degrees, gradually increasing the proximity we allow between us, then you may gradually increase the proximity that you can tolerate until it comes to the point at which you are able to step into the outside world again.”

“That sounds dangerous,” says Grantaire.

“I think we both agreed to a bit of danger when we took a vampire under our roof,” Bossuet reminds him. “Buck up, now. Am I to believe you have less adventurous spirit in you now than does _Camille?_ ”

“When it involves my friends…”

“Oh, hush, now,” says Joly. “In two weeks’ time I’ll slap your face for ever having considered leaving us without you.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is my third update today... sorry lol you guys are gonna think im nuts. i had a sudden spark of enthusiasm for vampire!R tho n i was like "fuck it"

“We’re clear, we’re clear, we’re clear…” Grantaire is repeating under his breath, his teeth grit, his eyes closed and his nostrils flared, as Bossuet stands with his hands on his friend’s tensed shoulders. He rubs his thumbs in small circles over Grantaire’s clavicles.

It’s the first human contact Grantaire’s had in a long, miserable month and a half. It feels so good that he can feel himself on verge of getting hard, or maybe on the verge of crying. Half of him wants to melt into the touch, trembling, to allow himself the warm comfort of Bossuet’s arms, to hold someone close and feel the reassurance of knowing that there is someone there who acknowledges and sympathizes with the pain, both physical and emotional, that never really stops coursing through Grantaire’s whole body nowadays. The other half of him wants to tear Bossuet’s throat open and suck the life from his beating veins.

“Stop, stop!” Grantaire yelps, his eyes snapping open at this thought, accompanied simultaneously by a more primal, more visual one: red, pulsing, wet, hot. He pulls out of Bossuet’s hands and retreats to the wall, panting.

Any instinctual fear that comes with this moment of danger is replaced rapidly by a grin that stretches across all of Bossuet’s face.

“Oh!” he says. “Yes! _Yes!_ That was wonderful. Oh, hoorah for Grantaire!”

“Hoorah for Grantaire!” Joly, along the opposite wall, repeats, throwing a fist in the air. His smile is full of amazement, excitement. He takes a step forward in their direction, and then a step back, remembering himself.

“‘Hoorah for Grantaire,’ my ass,” Grantaire snorts, leaning his head back against the wall. “I nearly bit you.”

“Yes, but you _didn’t_ ,” says Bossuet. “And I didn’t have to even lift a finger to stop you. You backed away on your own.”

“He touched you!” says Joly. “He touched you! I want to try.”

Grantaire looks across at Joly’s thin, pointed face, at Joly’s fingers twitching at his sides. He looks so much younger than his twenty-three years, so much more boyish and eager than most his age. Grantaire has always loved Joly, always trusted him and always cared for him, but in these past few weeks, their friendship has grown a newfound depth. Joly has seen Grantaire at his worst, countless times, but now Grantaire has also seen Joly’s worst. He’s seen Joly’s arms and hands all red and torn and angry and sizzling from where he’s tried to scrub imaginary dirt off with steel wool and hydrogen peroxide. He’s seen Joly lock and unlock and lock and unlock and lock and unlock the front door before bed so many times and for so long that Bossuet has to coax him upstairs with threats of Grantaire—and Bossuet’s right, because the goat will be in the hall by them, and Grantaire will be waiting, waiting in his bedroom with his stomach growling and his hands in trembling fists. He’s seen Joly pick his food apart into tiny, tiny crumbs and arrange them in perfect evenness around his plate before going on to spend the better part of four hours inspecting each for imperfections, for signs of beetles having lain eggs in the flour, for signs of blood vessels in his eggs, for signs of decay in bits of arugula. He’s seen Joly find those imperfections. He’s seen Joly refuse to eat for four days because of this.

It’s made him like Joly better, seeing these weaker moments of his. This is a man so frightened of disease that he point-blank refuses to shake hands with anyone, ever; and yet, this is also a man who will wake in the middle of the night to let a bleeding, promiscuous lush into his house, to wipe flecks of drying vomit and sweat from said lush’s chin and blood from a broken nose or split forehead with his own monogrammed handkerchief, and carry him off to sleep in his best armchair without saying so much as a word against him. Because Joly gives. Joly gives everything that he possibly can even though doing so must pain him more than anybody realizes, and for this Grantaire owes him his life a thousand times over.

“Stand where Bossuet is, then, mon ami,” says Grantaire.

Joly’s grin widens and he bounds forward, but Bossuet’s eyes narrow. He looks hard at Grantaire.

“Are you certain you ought to try again so soon, R?”

“Give him the syringe,” Grantaire says. “But, yes, I am. I can do it.”

Bossuet hands the sedative over to Joly, who pecks him on the cheek before turning his smile over to Grantaire. Grantaire gives a smile, tentative smile back.

“Please be careful,” says Bossuet as he backs over to the other side of the room. “Both of you.”

“Trust me,” says Grantaire, “My mind is better focused in this moment than it’s been in a decade.”

Joly’s giggle at this is quickly stifled when Grantaire takes his first step forward.

R has always been graceful. He’s always walked with a balance in his feet and an almost feminine swish in his hips. Neither Joly nor Bossuet (the latter with envy) can ever recall him having dropped something, having knocked something over, having made a movement that looked purposeless, even during the times when he was too drunk to stand. Yet now—now his grace is something ethereal, something awe-striking, something almost frightening to behold. As he takes the first few steps towards Joly, Joly has to hold his breath and reign in his heartbeat and remind himself that this is not a creeping panther, not an arrow whisking silently through the air—it’s Grantaire, and Grantaire is not going to hurt him.

By the time Joly is close enough to see the individual curls of Grantaire’s hair, he has calmed himself enough to stand straight up and meet Grantaire’s eyes. And although there is a look of furious concentration there that borders on something feral, it’s still Grantaire; it’s still Grantaire, and Grantaire is in those eyes, softening them, warming them, and trying to turn a pair of twitching lips up into something like a smile.

“It’s alright,” R murmurs, close enough now that if they both stretched out their arms, they could easily grasp hands. “This is a bearable enough distance. I believe I might almost stand this close to a stranger, now, if given the proper warning. Perhaps another week or two.”

He takes another step forward. His sigh ghosts over Joly’s face. To his credit, Joly doesn’t flinch.

“This is more difficult. I—” He shuts his eyes and inhales. “I almost enjoy this, in a rather painful sort of way. It’s much stronger, but it’s something like setting a chocolate croissant before a starving man and telling him that his friend will die should he eat it. But at least it smells nice.”

Joly gives an incredulous little laugh.

“Are you comparing me to food?” he asks. “No, more specifically, are you comparing me to a chocolate croissant?”

Grantaire’s eyes open and, when they do, there’s more of _him_ there, more of that familiar gleam, more gentleness, more quiet amusement.

“They were my favorite,” he says.

“I suppose I ought to be flattered, but I don’t believe I am.”

“I would be, if someone compared me to a chocolate croissant. Chocolate croissants are one of the things I miss most about the world. You can’t underestimate…” Grantaire says—and then he crosses the last of the distance between them.

They are face to face, and Joly is, strangely, unafraid. It feels incredibly normal. He can see the scars over Grantaire’s brow and eyelid where his father smashed a bottle when he was young. He doesn’t remember when he heard that story. It might have been years ago.

“You can’t underestimate how important small pleasures are until you lose them,” R says. “Life is only worth living in the flesh.”

There is a warm, steady hand on Joly’s upper arm. His heart jumps, but he doesn’t let himself pull away—no, instead, he reaches out and touches R’s elbow.

They stay like that for a while, looking at one another, remembering each other’s faces. It feels almost sensual, but far for sexual. Just intimately fraternal.

“I would embrace you—” says Joly.

R’s breath catches. He nods.

“Do it,” he says.

“R…”

“Please, Joly. I would myself, but I believe it’s easier to remain still. You have the syringe. If you feel me move too suddenly for your comfort, or if I say so, use it.”

And so slowly, slowly, Joly takes his fingers from Grantaire’s elbow and lifts his opposite arm as well, syringe held loosely in his fingers. He takes one small step forward, and then another—and then he’s wrapping his arms around Grantaire, burying his head into his chest. R’s body is tense, but he shifts ever-so-slightly, ever-so-gradually, until his own arms fall over Joly’s shoulders.

It is deeply, deeply comforting to feel someone else’s body against his own after so long, and this time, Grantaire does cry. He feels the tears prickling up along his waterlines, and he lets them fall, sniffling, trying to keep his nose out of Joly’s hair for fear of smelling him too deeply and losing control. But he doesn’t feel out of control. He doesn’t feel close to breaking. He feels, for the first time in six weeks, safe. He feels comforted. He feels like maybe everything will be okay.

They sway on the spot, clutching one another, breathing in rhythm, both of their eyes closed, until a little sniffle comes from the other side of the room.

Joly opens his eyes and peeks over at Bossuet, whose eyes are streaming as much as Grantaire’s.

“If you two hold one another any longer, I’ll think you’re trying to steal Camille from me, R,” Bossuet jokes, giving a watery little chuckle. He wipes at his eyes.

“I just might,” Grantaire murmurs. He sounds halfway towards falling asleep. “This is undoubtedly the best hug I’ve ever been given.”

“I’ve missed you,” Joly whispers.

“I’ve missed you, too.”

“Me too,” says Bossuet. “I’ve missed you, R.”

“And I’ve missed you, dear eagle.” Grantaire sniffles. He shuts his eyes. “Joly, mon chѐr, I’m going to let you free now.”

“Of course,” says Joly.

Grantaire steps away, back to the wall. In another lifetime, he would have rubbed Joly’s back, pressed quick kisses to his cheeks, perhaps even picked him up and spun him like a child—but in this one, he’s been stripped of his favorite flourishes, and he merely steps back with a small smile.

“Hoorah for Grantaire,” he says, softly, into the silence. “The man who doesn’t eat his friends up as though they were chocolate croissants.”

Bossuet and Joly break into twin grins.

“Hoorah for Grantaire!” says Bossuet, as Joly whistles.


	6. Chapter 6

Grantaire hasn’t considered that anyone would miss his presence. Or rather, he has considered it and come to the _conclusion_ that no one will miss his presence. Or that, if they do, they will not be sorry to note his absence.

He is, evidently, mistaken—because none other than Jehan Prouvaire elbows in through the front door alongside of Joly and Bossuet one night, demanding to see him.

“Where is he, Joly?” The poet’s voice rings out sharp and shrill from the front hallway. “Where is he? What have you been doing with him?”

“Camille hasn’t ‘been doing’ a thing—” The clatter of the hat-stand falling over; Bossuet’s muttered curse. “You needn’t go on as though he’s Doctor Frankenstein.”

“You’ve locked him up again, haven’t you? You believe a man’s vices—you believe his drinking entitles you to hold him against his will, do you not? I know you, Joly; I understand your need for control. I’ve seen you do this before. Well, I tell you, it goes against all I stand for! All _you_ stand for! It goes against all of the principles you profess to hold. Grantaire is no less a man than you or I, and if you think that you can deny him his freedom—”

“Jehan, how dare you say such things to Joly,” says Grantaire’s tired voice from the top of the stairs.

Seven weeks. Seven weeks since he’s seen Prouvaire. He’s missed him sharply in that time, missed their endless midnight discussions, missed even the absurdity of his friend’s dress: the sharp waistline cinched in with what looks to be a lady’s corset, the yellow jacket with its floppy neckline, the green-and-grey-checkered trousers, the daffodil clipped into his almost impolitely long curls.

“R!” cries the poet, breaking free of Bossuet’s light grip on his arm to begin a rush up the stairs.

“Stop where you are,” Grantaire says, taking a step away from the bannister. “Please. I have missed you, mon ami. I do not wish to harm you.”

“Harm me?” laughs Prouvaire, but he stops halfway up the stairs nevertheless, looking quizzical. “Why, Grantaire… Why on earth should you harm me?”

Before Grantaire can open his mouth, Joly, who is fiddling with the lock down in the hall, says, “He is ill.”

Grantaire shoots Joly a look.

“In a manner of speaking,” Joly amends.

Prouvaire is glancing between them, blinking.

“Well, what does this mean? R, when shall you recover? Is it catching?” Instinctively, he plucks the daffodil from his hair and brings it to his nose to ward off any airs of sickness, looking up the stairs with confusion and pity.

Grantaire tilts his head to one side.

“I don’t know if it’s catching. I hadn’t thought… I don’t believe Joly has experienced any ill effects, but then… Well, I seem to have caught it, in one way or another.”

“Tell me what it is, then, for I’m terribly concerned for you.”

Grantaire seems, for once in his life, at a loss for words.

Jehan’s face is falling rapidly. He takes another step up the stairs.

“Oh, R. R. Please don’t tell me you are… R, I couldn’t go on if you were to die. My dearest friend…”

“No, no, of course not. I’m not dying. I should have thought to mention it to you if I were.” He tries a smile, spreads his arms and gives a nod down to his newly full figure—he’s had to have his clothes tailored to fit. “Do I look like a dying man?”

“No,” says Prouvaire, scratching his ear. “You look rather healthier than I’ve ever seen you.”

“Right, then.”

“Why, then, can I not come near you?” Prouvaire begs. “Where have you been these past week?”

Grantaire looks helplessly down towards Joly and Bossuet. The both of them—it’s strange, really, how similar their mannerisms are after living together for so long—give small flourishes of their hands as if to say, _This is yours to tell_. Grantaire sighs.

“If you come near me, I fear I will bite you,” he says.

“ _Bite_ me?”

“Oh, don’t look so aghast, I—yes. I fear I will bite you. I have almost bitten Joly twice already, and once I’ve succeeded, although barely. I’ve pounced on Bossuet as well.”

Prouvaire is blinking.

“What on earth…”

“Every evening they bring me a goat, and every night I drain another of these poor creatures of blood, and in the morning, Joly takes its corpse out to the curb. It’s blood. I have an insatiable appetite for blood. And I fear that if you come too near, I might kill you as I have those goats. Joly and Bossuet have taken to keeping syringes of morphine on them to use should I attack them. Which I have. I am feral, Jehan. There is something very much the matter with me.”

“Oh, R…”

Grantaire looks as though he might cry, and more than anything, Prouvaire wishes to run up the last few steps and embrace him, but…

“I have heard of this phenomenon before, and yet I’ve never witnessed it myself. I never truly believed in it, you know. It always seems like a superstitious sort of thing; one of the stories a great-uncle might tell to frighten you,” Prouvaire says. “And you’re saying… You’re saying that it’s true, and that it’s happening to you.”

“That is exactly what I’m saying. Yes. Look—” And R pulls up his lips with his fingers to show the hooked, study fangs that have replaced his canine teeth. Prouvaire gapes, and then whistles softly.

“How fascinating,” he says.

“It is not,” says Joly, loudly, from the hall. “It is most certainly not fascinating. It is terrible.”

“It is both,” says Grantaire.

Prouvaire has his hands placed around his neck, watching Grantaire with scholarly interest.

“When—well, shall I ever be able to come near you again? Or will we be resigned to shouting our philosophizings at one another from across the room?”

Grantaire laughs at this.

“I am getting better by the day at controlling these urges. In fact…” He pauses, biting at a dry fleck on his lip.

“Yes? In fact—?”

“Well. I’ve made enough progress that I now trust myself to touch Joly and Bossuet, if the instance is controlled, if they have their sedatives in reach, and if I am… well-fed. If you wanted to, perhaps—well, if you wanted to try it yourself—”

“I would,” says Prouvaire. “I would most definitely.”

Bossuet makes a noise of trepidation down in the hall.

“Once our lovely friends have fed their pet monster,” Grantaire says, a little more loudly, “perhaps we might try. With their approval, of course. This is their home.”

“I approve,” says Joly, perhaps in hopes of being forgiven for his earlier comment on the awfulness of Grantaire’s condition. Bossuet glances at him.

“Excellent,” says Grantaire.

\---

Knowing that Prouvaire is upstairs while he is eating quite embarrasses Grantaire every time that his consciousness pokes through the bloodlust and he becomes aware again of the sorts of noises that he makes. Fresh eyes—or fresh ears—make the whole thing thirty times more shameful again. And poor Bossuet. Poor Bossuet, who truly loves animals, and who is now resigned to lead home a fresh goat to be slaughtered every night. And how many has it been now? Fifty? Sixty? There must be a shortage of livestock by now. Bossuet must be visiting at least ten different vendors all over the city. It does little to ease Grantaire’s guilt that he, Grantaire, is buying all of these animals and that it’s making a significant dent in his savings; it’s the inconvenience of the thing he resents, the psychological toll it must take on his friends. Bossuet has always had a soft heart, too soft for the excessive killings of innocent creatures. And poor Joly, good old Joly, cleans the hallway three times a day, even though Grantaire never spills a drop of blood on the tiles.

This is what he thinks about in the back of his mind as his body goes to work on draining the creature. It’s a billy goat this evening, big and horned and strong. It puts up a fight until its last, until the blood that Grantaire is drinking has grown heavy and cold—Grantaire doesn’t stop when this happens, even when his stomach is protesting angrily, its skin stretched to the breaking point. He never can until the last drop is gone.

His teeth finally release their deathgrip on the goat when this happens, and he gasps like a swimmer breeching the surface. The wiry hairs on the creature’s neck bend and part with his breath. He lies there for a long moment, getting his wind back, before he rolls over onto his back with a long groan—God damn it all, Jehan is upstairs, listening—and stares up at the ceiling. He considers unbuttoning his trousers, which are making it difficult to breathe with all of his organs squashed up the way they are against his swollen stomach, but he’s concerned that they’ll come downstairs and see him with his trousers undone and think—

They give him time to recover, which he appreciates, and when he hears the master bedroom door opening about a half-hour later, he climbs rather laboriously to his feet, adjusts his cravat, and brushes himself off. There is goat hair all over his jacket.

Bossuet comes the top of the stairs first, with Joly close behind and Prouvaire bringing up the rear, peering over their shoulders. He looks more curious than he does frightened, which would make Grantaire laugh if he weren’t so ashamed of this scene, the dead goat at his feet, hair on his clothes, belly straining at his shirt, hair tousled.

“Hello, Jehan,” he says sheepishly.

Prouvaire waves.

“Hello, R, mon chѐr. There’s no need to look so ashamed. I eat plenty of chevon myself.”

“Right,” says Grantaire. He tugs a hands through his hair. “Right. Well, if you’re ready, then, I’m going to head to the sitting room. It’s… nicer in there. Joly and Bossuet can bring you in.”

With this and a shaky two-fingered salute, he crosses out of sight into a room off the hall. Prouvaire catches Joly’s eye and smiles.

“This is the most unusual thing I’ve done in years,” Prouvaire says.

“Only in years?” asks Bossuet over his shoulder. He’s leading the way down the stairs now.

Prouvaire thinks, weighing his memories.

“Yes, only in years,” he says. He nudges the dead goat with his toe as they pass it, leaning down to examine its glassy eyes. “Fascinating stuff, though.”

Grantaire is up against the opposite wall when they enter, fidgeting with his cravat. Prouvaire looks him up and down in the light and smiles.

“Well-fed, indeed,” he teases.

“Fight me,” mutters Grantaire, and Prouvaire laughs.

“Take this, mon ami,” says Bossuet, nudging Prouvaire’s arm. He passes him a syringe full of cloudy off-white liquid. “Keep that in hand and, should he move too quickly, use it.”

“Don’t hesitate,” Grantaire adds.

Prouvaire nods.

“Here we are,” says Joly, nudging him forward. “Stand by this chair, and he’ll approach.”

“Alright.”

There’s a moment where Grantaire meets Jehan’s eye, twinkling, unafraid, and he feels almost calm. With his first step forward, however, this fades. His palms itch as he moves closer.

“You walk like a cat,” Prouvaire says, softly, watching him. “You always have, but now…”

“Hush,” says Bossuet. “Don’t distract him.”

“No, please do,” says Grantaire, stopping. “Please talk with me, Jehan. But not of… not of this. Tell me about something else.”

“I’ve met a scintillating man,” Prouvaire says, as though continuing a conversation they’ve been having for minutes. Grantaire takes another pace forward.

“Oh? Scintillating?”

“Indeed. He sparkles like well-shaped opal. Beautiful and yet mysterious. He brought me this daffodil this morning; left it on my doorstep with a knock.” Prouvaire fingers the flower in his hair.

“It’s lovely.”

“Yes, thank you. I dressed to match it.” Prouvaire straightens the lapels of his yellow jacket. “He’s ever so shy around me. He cannot present me with a flower in person. And yet, around others, he’s as loquacious as you’ve always been. It’s only me. Around me, he is as sweet and soft as drizzling rain tapping away on the roof.”

“And what is this gentleman’s name?”

“Montparnasse.”

Grantaire stops, two steps from Jehan.

“Montparnasse?”

“Yes.”

“I know Montparnasse. I’ve boxed with his… friends. He’s... a powerful man. And a sly one.”

“He is indeed.”

“If he should... hurt you in any way—”

“He will not,” says Prouvaire.

But Grantaire has gone still, his mouth half-open, his eyes distant.

“R?”

He blinks. His eyes fix back on Prouvaire’s face.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. His voice has gone hoarse and tight. “This is difficult for me. I thought about boxing, and then, if Montparnasse should…” He shakes his head hard, like a dog who’s been doused in water. “I shan’t be able to box again; I’ve just thought of that. If I see… If I see blood… Lord. Shit. Don’t move, Jehan. Don’t move.”

And he backs away, covering his nose and mouth. His eyes are terrified. He sinks back against the wall.

Prouvaire puts a hand to his throat.

“Oh, Grantaire. Oh, I’m sorry.”

“No, no. It’s no fault of yours. I am simply… Shit. God damn. God damn this, it never _ends!_ Shit.”

Grantaire sits down and covers his face, shaking.

“ _Shit!_ ” he yells again, into his knees, his hands curling to fists. “I cannot…”

Bossuet is taking Prouvaire’s arm, leading him back to the opposite wall.

“It’s alright,” Joly is whispering. “It’s alright, now.”

“Hush, Camille,” says Bossuet. “Grantaire, would you like us to go upstairs?”

And Grantaire wants only to spring up and rip Bossuet’s throat out, to end that patronizing, pitying tone forever. To kill all witnesses of his undoing. The shame is unbearable. He feels he will burst into flame with it.

But he says, “Yes,” and so they go, they go, leaving him alone in the sitting room.

He doesn’t move until dawn begins to creep through the curtains.


	7. Chapter 7

The word trickles out after that, of course. Damn Jehan.

A card comes from Bahorel. _Thought our dear poet friend was waxing hyperbolic,_ it says, _until Bossuet—who is much more levelheaded—assured me that it was true_. There is a well-labeled diagram of Bossuet’s bald, egg-shaped head beneath this. From Feuilly, Joly reluctantly brings home a wide paper fan that, when spread, shows an image of a woman that makes him flush deeply red, but which sends Grantaire into a fit of giggles. Marius sends along a box of chocolates with various types of fine liqueurs in; Grantaire only begrudgingly gifts these to Bossuet.

And, finally, a note arrives on fine blue stationery. “Our Best and Most Sincere Wishes. Come Back to us Soon,” it says. It is signed by Jehan, Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Bahorel, Feuilly, Marius, and even (in shaky letters that look more like symbols copied carefully down off of another slip of paper) Eponine and Gavroche.

Damn Jehan. Damn Jehan to hell for his truth-telling mouth.

Nevertheless, Grantaire pins the note up on the bedroom wall above the door, where he can see it from the bed, and stares at it in the hours of the day when he can’t sleep. He can read the names all the way from across the room, in the pitch-darkness. That is one good thing about his condition: he saves a great deal of money on not buying candles. He can see the splotches in the ink that left-handed Bahorel made as he signed. He can see the tight curl of Combeferre’s “C” and the accentuated dip in Marius’ “r”.

(He tries not to think about the name that is missing. He tries not to wonder at how the scene occurred. Tries not to think about Enjolras turning away in disgust, dropping the pen that Jehan probably pressed into his hand. Tries not to realize that he’ll never be welcomed back at the Musain now. Not like this. Not in this hideous shape he’s taken. Not when the Musain is a place ruled by a ruthless but glorious god—a temple to this god, a place of light and righteousness—and that he, Grantaire—he is anything but pure. And he has been cast out, cast down. If he walks in through that door again, if he stands in that god’s presence, he might burst into flame.)

Prouvaire drops by within the week. He’s hefting with him three live hens in a barred crate.

“I thought we could all take our supper together,” he says brightly, lifting the cage.

“My God,” says Grantaire, appearing the top of the stairs as silently as though he’d been standing there all along. He can’t help but laugh. “My God, mon ami, this is by far the strangest idea you’ve ever had.”

Prouvaire pouts.

“What’s so bad about it?”

“For starters,” says Bossuet, taking the hens’ crate to inspect—which he promptly drops on his toe as one of the birds pecks at his fingers. “Ouch. _Ouch_. Damn. Sorry. Sorry, chickies. But, um, yes, for starters, Prouvaire, although this was very thoughtful of you, vampires don’t eat chicken.”

“No, no, I could eat chicken,” Grantaire says quickly, feeling his stomach growl at the sound of the birds’ tiny, panicked heartbeats drifting up the stairs.

“You see?” says Jehan. “Let’s have supper.”

“But I don’t want you _watching_ me eat them,” Grantaire amends. “That would be horrible. It’d frighten you.”

“On the contrary,” says Jehan, with a frown, “I’d be honored if you’d let me watch you. I’m very much taken with studying your current situation. I’ve been reading up on it: old folktales and such.”

Grantaire visibly pales.

“Not that I envy you, of course!” Jehan says. “It’s more of a scientific curiosity. Are you not interested yourself?”

“Not in the slightest,” says Grantaire. “But… you really don’t object to… Jehan, are you not…?”

Both Bossuet and Jehan are watching him, waiting for him to say something.

“Are you not horrified by me?” he blurts.

“R!” Jehan cries. “How could you think such a thing?”

“I… If I had had one bit less self-control the other night, I would have killed you.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“He’s right. It isn’t,” Bossuet tells him. “I will admit, with some deserved shame, that I myself was indeed horrified by you at first, R, but no longer. I know now that you are unchanged. Only the symptoms of your affliction are cause of any worry to me, not you yourself.”

“You could never frighten us,” says Jehan.

Bossuet nods.

“You’re our friend,” he says. “We will take you as you are.”

“Even such as this?” asks Grantaire, who is leaned sideways against the top of the railing now as though the weight of their words might make him stagger, looking down at his toes.

“As I said, I think it’s interesting,” says Jehan. “If somewhat unfortunate.”

“You live in my home,” Bossuet reminds Grantaire. “You live in my home with my Camille. If I thought you were any danger to him, I wouldn’t hesitate to revoke that hospitality.”

Grantaire is still for a long moment. And then he shakes his head.

“Thank you,” he says quietly.

“You’re welcome,” says Jehan. He holds up the hens he’s brought. “Now, supper!”

Bossuet looks over his shoulder down the hall.

“Camille is sleeping off a bad fit of nerves,” he whispers, “but don’t you dare bring those dirty, feathery things into the kitchen. He’ll _know_.”

“Where can we eat?” asks Jehan.

“Grantaire’s bedroom.”

Grantaire blinks. His room is heaped with blankets and various belongings from his old quarters—pots and pans and books and rugs and half-finished paintings that he’s now turned to the wall, unable to look at. He’s almost certain that the three of them won’t actually _fit_ in his bedroom. Not to mention that he has about ten used syringes lying about and vials of morphine scattered everywhere.

“No, please, Bossuet,” he says. “Anywhere else. I don’t even want you both watching me eat in the first place, and—”

Oh. There’s a twinkle in Bossuet’s eye. Idiot. He’s only been teasing.

“Perhaps the sitting room, then,” Bossuet says.

\---

 _This is absurd_ , Grantaire is thinking over and over again in a rhythm like a coin spiraling in a circle until it drops. _This is absurd. This is absurd._

Bossuet’s pushed away the armchairs and spread out a blanket on the floor as though they’re picnicking in the park. There are two place-setting and three pillows, the one without a place-setting at a significant distance from the other two in the interest of safety. In the center of the blanket are placed a vase of fresh lilies, a bottle of wine, a platter of pork-chops and well-peppered asparagus, a basket of bread, a boat of fine olive oil, and a cage with three live hens in it.

Absurd.

“Mis amis,” Bossuet proclaims, spreading his arms wide as he sets the oil down, “à table!”

Grantaire is silent as he sits down on his faraway pillow and folds his legs underneath himself. The hens are fluttering and fighting in their cage, the smell of asparagus is making him nauseous, and Jehan and Bossuet are here to watch him take pleasure in killing. He can feel the back of his neck growing all hot and sweaty.

They have agreed upon the way this will work, to make it as natural and familiar as possible, and they begin without speaking. Bossuet breaks the bread and passes half to Jehan before tipping out a bit of oil onto his plate and passing the boat. They both dust off their hands of flour and glance to R. He looks back, cheeks burning.

“Bon appѐtit,” says Bossuet with a little nod, and smiles. He then dips his bread and takes a bite. Jehan follows suit.

The meal has begun. There is no putting it off any longer now. With his cheek between his molar, R leans forward and takes the knob of birds’ cage door. He unlatches it carefully.

His trepidation is pushed completely out of mind once he gets his hand around one of the birds. He manages to get the cage shut before his body takes over completely—his teeth latch into the hen’s breast—his hands grip her feet and head as if they were no more alive than the ends of a cob of corn—the world outside of her body disappears—all Grantaire can behind his closed eyelids is red, undulating blood—all he can hear is the sound of her thrashing heartbeat, the fluttering of her pulse.

Hens, he learns all too quickly, have much less blood than goats. She goes cold too fast. Her veins go flat within a minute. And Grantaire is left panting, blinking confusedly down at her corpse, his mouth open and wet, and his body roaring for _more_.

He finds enough composure to lick his lips, to shut his mouth, and to glance nervously up at Jehan. He’s watching with genuine interest—but Grantaire has to look away again before turning to Bossuet—he’s too hungry—he’s too full of the bloodlust to look something that smells _so good_ in the eyes—so he reaches for the cage again and lifts out another chicken, this one squawking indignantly as he picks her up, thrashing her little legs. He doesn’t have time for this. He bites.

And before Bossuet and Jehan have even finished their bread—although this may be due to the somewhat distracting scene playing out before them—Grantaire has sucked all three hens dry. There’s a wild look in his eyes, something bright and furious, and he sits forward with his legs drawn up to his chest for a long while after he’s finished, nose tucked into his knees like a child. A child with terrible eyes.

Jehan and Bossuet eat their pork-chops. It’s almost agonizingly slow, and the chewing noises they make are so loud in Grantaire’s ears—the muscles working stickily in their jaws, their tongues, their saliva, the wine mingling with it and swishing down the wet tubes of their throats, the dead flesh being stripped from the bones and pushed around their teeth—that he almost wants to shout at them, to throw something at them, to make them stop—but then he remembers that they have just listened to him eat, and that the sounds he makes are much, much louder and much, much more obscene. It’s awful.

 _Sustenance is death_ , he thinks while he waits, his stomach still rumbling, his body protesting, yelling at him to leap across the room and bite open both of their throats. _To live in this world, you have to do terrible things. You have to survive terrible things. You have to eat and to feed. And everybody knows. And everybody knows that everybody else knows. And everybody somehow keeps on living, even though it only leads to death and death and more death…_

“How are the potatoes?” he mumbles after a while, through his knees.

Prouvaire smiles at him.

“Our eagle is an excellent cook,” he says, and Bossuet thanks him. “How was your entrée, R?”

Grantaire can’t help but laugh. He rubs his forehead with his thumbs.

“Wonderful,” he says. “Thank you for this, Jehan. I needed a change.”

“I needed your company, mon chѐr. I’ve missed you. We all have.”

Something occurs to Grantaire then.

“Jehan, you won’t tell anyone of this, will you?”

Prouvaire’s eyes grow wide with dread.

“I’ve told that of your affliction already. I thought—”

“No, no, that’s done with. But this. The specifics. With the hens. How it looks.”

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

“I don’t want you to. I don’t want everyone knowing. I don’t want anyone thinking too closely about me. The more that they know… I don’t want anyone to be forced to choose a side. They will either decide to continue their friendships with me, or they will decide that I am an abomination. And I don’t wish for anyone to decide on that either way.”

“Grantaire, there is not one of us who’d think you an abomination. For God’s sake—”

“Enjolras already does.”

A silence falls. Bossuet looks up, a bit of potato falling off of his fork. Jehan’s mouth, which has been open, ready to protest, closes.

There is pity in both pairs of eyes.

Grantaire gives a dry little wheeze of a laugh.

“R, no, that’s not—” Bossuet starts.

“I _told_ you,” Prouvaire spits across at Bossuet. “I _told_ you he’d take it to mean that he didn’t care.”

“That wasn’t me with whom you argued; that was Joly! I was in favor of Enjolras signing the note.”

“I specifically remember you saying that R wouldn’t want him to know.”

“I was weighing out the pros and cons—”

Grantaire is shaking his head, setting the dead chickens back in the crate that they arrived in, gathering himself up. He stands amidst protests for him to sit.

“Hush, both of you,” he says. “It doesn’t matter to me whether or not he knows. What should I care? I will never see him again. I will never venture outside again and, if I do, it will be to kill. And I should hope that, if that _should_ happen, my path of destruction won’t lead towards _Enjolras_ , of all men. Anyone but him.” He looks at their stricken faces and smiles. “Or either of you, of course,” he amends.

“R, sit back down,” Prouvaire pleads. “We ought to discuss this. Perhaps I can bring Enjolras by next time…”

“No,” says Grantaire, so loudly that the poet flinches. “No. I would rather die than have him see me like this. I would—” That same wheezy laugh again. He grabs at his own hair, grinning. “I’d rather have my liver torn out by vultures every day of my life.”

“My God, don’t say such things,” says Bossuet. “Enjolras is only a man.”

There is a flush to Grantaire’s cheeks. He’s breathing hard and looks terrified, revolted, and guilty—but he also looks ecstatic.

“There is no such this as only a man,” he says. “And, if there was, Enjolras would never fit such a degrading description.”

Bossuet lets out a noise of frustration and makes a flourish of his hand in the air as though he’s resigned himself to the end of this discussion.

“Well then,” he says. "Help me gather these dishes."


	8. Chapter 8

Courfeyrac and Marius are out on their morning stroll by the Seine, their arms jovially linked, deep in conversation about the golden-haired beauty to whom Marius has been passing notes through her father’s garden wall, when they happen upon a familiar shape curled up on a bench.

“Enjolras?” asks Courfeyrac, incredulously. He reaches out and shakes the sleeping man’s shoulder.

Enjolras starts awake, swinging out an instinctual fist which hits Marius squarely in the diaphragm—Marius lets out an _ooph!_ of surprise and jumps back.

“Marius?” Enjolras murmurs, rubbing bloodshot eyes.

“None other,” groans Marius, doubled over.

“Sorry about that. I thought—”

“What the devil are you doing here?” says Courfeyrac. “You could have been robbed. Or killed. Robbed _and_ killed.”

“I fell asleep,” says Enjolras.

“That much is clear. If you were not, I should have had to thrash you soundly for Pontmercy’s sake.”

Courfeyrac leans in and plants a kiss on Marius’ cheek. Marius goes red and bats him away.

“Yes,” says Enjolras. “I was working late at the Musain, and I came to sit by the water when Madame Hucheloup asked me to leave, and I suppose I must have drifted off.”

“Good old long-suffering Madame, putting up with such late nights and such silent company all for a man whose heart belongs only to his _Patria_.”

Enjolras smiles faintly. He’s sitting up, running a hand through his tangled curls, gathering up his books and notes from beside him on the bench.

“Would you care to join us, Enjolras?” Marius asks. “We were just off to meet two lovely girls for a late breakfast and I was already deliberating how to tell mine that in the time since Courfeyrac has scheduled this breakfast, my heart has been claimed another. You would be an excellent distraction.”

“Certainly not,” says Enjolras, and Marius looks vaguely disappointed. Perhaps because he hasn’t been asked about the newfound target of his admiration. But Enjolras doesn’t much care to hear.

“Enjolras has a country to save,” Courfeyrac explains to Marius, teasingly. “He cannot be bothered with such trivialities as breakfast and pretty girls.”

This is partially true, of course, but Enjolras doesn’t know how to admit to it without sounding conceited, and so he only stands up, claps both his friends on their shoulders, and says, “Enjoy yourselves.”

“We will indeed,” says Courfeyrac.

“Good day to you, Enjolras,” says Marius. “We’ll be at the meeting tomorrow night.”

“As will I,” says Enjolras. This makes Courfeyrac laugh, for some strange reason. “Good day.”

“Good day.”

And they part ways.

\---

It’s not that Enjolras thinks that breakfast and pretty girls are below him, not really (although he’s never found much interest in the latter, never really seen the physical appeal that others seem to see, and he quite enjoys his bachelorhood.) It’s just that every second that he spends breakfasting and every second that he spends in relaxed company is another second that he is wasting, and he does not have seconds to waste. There are children who are starving. And his relative status—though his boots are wearing thin on the bottoms, nowadays—ought to be used to prevent them from starving, not to breakfast.

Not that he blames Courfeyrac. He could never blame Courfeyrac, who has been one of his most intimate friends since childhood (and Enjolras does not make friends easily; like pretty girls, they hold no inherent appeal for him—although he does indeed love Courfeyrac, and undoubtedly his life is better with him in it.) Perhaps there is some merit to refreshing oneself occasionally. Perhaps it returns the mind to a more neutral state, unclutters it in some way. But Enjolras simply cannot see himself as a full-grown man living a life in which every waking moment was not filled with the endless burning fire of revolution. He wouldn’t _want_ that life.

Even as a boy, Enjolras studied world history almost compulsively, reciting the names and facts and dates in the place of casual conversation, poring over books after endless books to the point where his father beat him dozens of times for reading under the table during supper. He never had many friends. He had books. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t need many friends now. He has _Patria._

And yet… sometimes he resents this about himself, this give-or-take attitude towards most others. On those rare occasions when Enjolras thinks about himself, about his life, about his interpersonal relationships, a cold worry washes over his throat—a feeling as though he’s missing something important, as if he’s left his vest at home or forgotten to set the daily saucer of fish out on the windowsill for the little grey tabby cat who lives in the alley behind his rooms. Recently, Enjolras has been having these moments with almost disconcerting frequency—so often, in fact, that he’s begun to wonder whether there’s some truth to them. Whether his friends are merely acquaintances. Whether he’s only a small, somewhat unpleasant but generally tolerable smudge in their larger pictures. Multiple times in the past weeks, he’s found Combeferre and Courfeyrac having whispered conversations that stop when Enjolras grows near. Joly and Bossuet duck out of meetings early, sometimes taking Jehan with them. Bahorel sits and scribbles things while Feuilly looks over his shoulder, pausing and hiding the bit of paper under a stray plate when Enjolras joins them. Perhaps things have always been this way. Perhaps he just hasn’t bothered to notice until now.

But there’s no use thinking about it. He’ll never know unless he asks them outright, and he certainly isn’t going to do that. Because if they are annoyed by him, he’ll drive them away completely, and if they _aren’t_ , he’ll just look like a fool—which will start him on the path to driving them away, or perhaps remind them of all the other foolish things he’s done, which are enough to drive anyone away. That’s one thing Enjolras is good at. He’s always been good at getting rid of people.

Grantaire hasn’t even bothered to attend a meeting in two months. Enjolras hasn’t even _seen_ him in two months. It’s become his secret bargaining chip: every time he begins to think to highly of himself, every time the half of his brain that sounds remarkably like Combeferre tells him, “You’re not doing so poorly. You’re somewhat of a likeable person,” he has only to remind that little voice that Grantaire’s chair at the back table has been empty for two months and voice quiets itself. Two months. Two months isn’t something that happens by accident.

\---

Enjolras goes back to his rooms. He sets a saucer of what is now horribly smelly fish on the windowsill. And then he flops down in bed with his boots still on and sleeps, dreamlessly, for twelve hours.


	9. Chapter 9

“Enj,” says Combeferre. He’s gnawing at the scuffed metal end of his fountain pen, dark eyes narrowed. “Let me do the speech.”

“Quiet,” says Enjolras, whose head is bent over the paper, combing it for errors. “I won’t hear of it.”

“You think me incapable?”

“No, you think _me_ incapable and, frankly, I take offense.”

“And you therefore insist on the principle of pure spite, do you?”

“I do.”

“This is childishness. You haven’t slept in two nights. You’ve been here, scribbling away, probably getting sores all over your bony backside from that chair—”

“ _Ferre._ ”

“—haven’t eaten. Look, your hands are trembling!”

“No more than usual.”

“I’m doing the speech,” says Combeferre, “and that is that.”

“No. You aren’t.”

“You’ll misrepresent our cause your state.”

“Now, we both know that isn’t true. You’re only trying to put me off.”

“You’ll faint on the floor.”

“I have never fainted in my life.”

“I’ve _seen_ you faint.”

Enjolras mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like, “…don’t like mice,” scratching a note in the margin on his paper.

“Enjolras…”

“No, Ferre,” he says, finally throwing his pen down and looking up. His eyes are hard. “I have written the speech and I will give it myself. I must. It is a matter of principle to me. Our numbers have been waning, and I must do something to wax them again. I must. It’s my own fault that we haven’t been drawing the same crowd in recent months, and it ought to be I who rectifies the situation.”

“Our numbers?” Combeferre repeats, as though this is absurd. “No, our numbers have grown as of late. More men, and even more women, have been signing the attendance sheet than ever.”

Enjolras shakes his head.

“Regardless,” he says. “Regardless, we have lost some key members lately, and I don’t intend to lose any more.”

Combeferre stills.

“This is about Grantaire.”

He says it like it’s a relief, like it’s a realization, like he’s about to give good news, like he can offer an explanation for Grantaire’s absence that’ll clear everything up—but then something in his face is gone as suddenly as a candle being blown out, something goes quiet.

He knows why Grantaire’s gone, Enjolras realizes. Grantaire’s told him the reason. Grantaire’s spoken to him. And Combeferre doesn’t want to tell, Enjolras knows instinctively, because it’ll wound Enjolras’ pride. Because Grantaire has walked away from _Enjolras_.

Well then. Well, then good riddance, Enjolras thinks, bitterly. Good riddance. If anyone wants to leave, they can leave. He certainly won’t force anyone to stay if they’ve lost their interest, if they’ve come to disagree with the group’s ideals. If they no longer want to stay. If they no longer want to debate with him. If they don’t even have the courtesy to openly oppose him anymore. He certainly won’t force them to. He certainly won’t. It’s best that the ABC remain free of dissention, anyhow.

“Not solely,” says Enjolras, and although this is true, he can’t seem to stop the heat from rising in his cheeks. “The group as a _whole_ seems much less cohesive lately. Almost distracted.”

Combeferre just looks at him helplessly. Enjolras wants him to _say something_.

“Am I not right?” he prods.

“Well,” says Combeferre, “to a certain extent, I suppose. In a sense. Although you must understand that these men and women all have their own lives, and that they have their own conflicts outside of the ABC to cope with, and that perhaps—”

“I do not,” says Enjolras, plainly. “I myself have nothing outside of the ABC, because nothing is more important than our cause. Not when there are women and children who are dying on the streets. And if our members cannot see this… If what you say is true, how can they not see? How can they bear to live their own lives when others are starving? How can they simply walk away from the cause like this? How can they not see that their participation is a necessity?”

Combeferre sighs. He slaps his ballpoint pen down against the table with his palm and, though the gesture is far from aggressive, the clatter of it is loud against the faint hum of the talk from the other rooms of the Musain.

“You ask how,” he says. “How is it that others’ feelings of self-worth aren’t entirely tied up in the broader brushstrokes of affecting societal change? This is an easy question for anyone besides yourself. Others are satisfied merely by smaller, simpler acts of kindness, of tenderness. Helping a friend, holding a door, making love, tipping the messenger boy a bit extra. Things don’t always have to be lasting to be effective because, in fact, nothing is lasting. Everything we do will eventually be forgotten by history. And what little we can do to love one another in our own personal lives is really the best that we _can_ do. And I hope that one day you will see this, mon ami, and that you will find peace. You are only responsible for your own actions, not the actions of the government against its people. Anything at all that you do is enough.”

Enjolras’ lips are parted and his brow is furrowed like a boy who’s just been reprimanded. His throat feels too bare, too red.

“You have too good a heart,” says Combeferre, softly. “It’s terrible to watch it consume you.”

No, no, no, Enjolras wants to cry; no, you don’t understand. I am selfish. I am vain. I am angry.

Instead he only sighs and says, “I think I need something to eat.”

“That’s the spirit,” says Combeferre.


	10. Chapter 10

Something wonderful happens in the third month. It is this: Grantaire goes outside.

He eats a big meal, shoots up enough morphine that he can feel his eyeballs humming inside his skull, drapes himself in his big heavy cloak, throws the hood over his head, stuffs his hands in his pockets, and—without a word to Joly and Bossuet, who are sleeping upstairs and who might try to talk him out of it, who might deflate his courage—walks out the front door.

The fresh night air hits his face and fills his lungs with a shock like being plunged underwater. He almost gasps. It’s cold and hard and _brilliant_ , full of a wealth of individual smells: horses and sewage and people and alcohol and rain and the gas burning in the streetlights. Its takes all the strength he can muster not to rush to the first person he sees and embrace them, sing his freedom in their bewildered face, or perhaps even bite them—he doesn’t know, he doesn’t care to find out. He walks with his head down under his hood and his shoes clicking on the cobblestones, not even bothering to suppress the wide grin on his face.

He avoids his usual (his old? No, his _usual_ , he decides) streets and instead takes a roundabout path down the Seine. Here, the sounds of the rain hitting the water are like small handfuls of seeds being tossed on a wooden floor, the yowls of two alley cats fighting or making love resonate out from somewhere, but all else is silent. He can smell someone sleeping on a bench up ahead, so he turns and walks the other way to avoid them, watching the water, smiling to himself. The air is clammy: all foggy and sticky and cold.

He walks the path back and forth for hours, ducking out of the ways of strangers, keeping his head down. It’s the best night he’s had in months.

He makes it back to the brownstone before the sun comes up without incident and, in the morning, while Joly and Bossuet are breakfasting, sweeps down the stairs, throws his arms around Joly, pecks Bossuet on the cheek, and says, “I went out last night.”

Joly drops his fork.

“You went _out_ last night?” he squeaks. “ _Outside?_ ”

Grantaire drops gracefully across the arms of the wooden chair that’s become his. He’s happy and sleepy, full of a second dose of morphine and of the memory of night air. The smile’s still on his face. It feels good there. It’s been too long.

“Yes,” he says. “I did.”

“Dear lord, dear _lord,_ where—why did you fail to tell us?” asks Joly, who’s gone all white now.

It takes a moment for Grantaire to decide on an answer.

“Agency,” he says, when he does. “I wanted some agency. Some freedom.”

“And… and what happened? You’ve clearly returned safely, but everyone else… Is everyone alright? Did you—?”

“No, Joly, I didn’t bite anybody. For Christ’s sake. I wouldn’t have risked it were I not prepared. I took a nice, long walk along the Seine, looked at the water, and came back.”

“Well, I think it’s excellent,” says Bossuet. He’s nodding hard, a smile creeping up his cheeks. “Excellent. Excellent.”

“It rained last night,” Grantaire continues. “I felt it on my cheeks again. And the air—God, you wouldn’t believe the air after having been cooped up so long. And the river— And, my friends, my wonderful friends, the best part is, I believe I’d like to come to the meeting tonight. I think I’ve been away from our friends long enough.”

Bossuet shakes his head like a dog trying to get water out of its fur—he can’t seem to stop saying “excellent, excellent”—before he lifts up his hands and begins a loud round of applause, grinning madly now. Grantaire grins back, shoving himself to his feet and making a well-flourished bow. Bossuet applauds even harder.

Joly bites his lip, touches his glass of milk—and then get to his feet and lifts it in a toast. Bossuet breaks his applause to do the same. Grantaire blinks, cups his hand into a “c” and, half-mockingly, hails them with his handful of air.

“To R,” says Joly, “who is far braver than I.”

“No, no,” says Grantaire, stopping them before they can drink. “To the friends who have saved his life. And who have been brave enough to house him and help him in such times.” He stops and laughs. “And to the third-person!”

“To the third-person!” Joly agrees.

“In all seriousness,” says Bossuet, “to all of us.”

“Yes, to all of us, then,” Grantaire concedes, and mimes clinking his glass to both of theirs.

\---

Enjolras is watching Combeferre speak through air that seems much too thick, almost as though everyone outside of Enjolras exists behind glass—like he’s put a fishbowl over his head and tried to engage with the world through it. He hasn’t slept in over sixty hours. He’s been nibbling at the plate of cheeses and dried meats that Combeferre set down in front of him before heading to the open floorspace at the front of the room, but all it’s done so far is make him nauseous. Salt and dairy were never meant to go together. And he can hear the words of his own speech, the speech that _he wrote_ , filling the warm room at the back of the Musain, resonating out in Combeferre’s voice, but the words sound all wrong now, all jumbled, impossible to follow.

But there’s a moment of clarity. Someone walks into the room and something hits Enjolras squarely in the chest. The atoms in the air all stand up erect, like a school of fish looking to the surface where a fly has landed, pointing, pointing. _Look_ , they says, and Enjolras looks.

It’s Grantaire. Grantaire walks in through the door.

He’s put on a noticeable amount of weight; the fabric of his dark-green vest—the one with the vertical stripes, the one with the ink-stain in the pocket—has been let out, with new panels of a dark gold color down its sides, but not enough: it rides up over a newly-acquired gut, showing the flowy white fabric of his undershirt beneath like the down of a fledgling goose. His hair is long, and neater than Enjolras has ever seen it, tied back with a green velvet ribbon. And his trousers—his trousers need tailoring as well; they cling to his thighs like a second skin, pooling below his knee.

His eyes shine. He’s grinning like a fox let into the chicken coop—a bit guilty, a bit out-of-place, but downright thrilled and just a little bit… something else. Something wicked. There are dark hollows under his eyes and his teeth are gleaming.

Enjolras’ chest fills with something both very hot and very cold.

Grantaire catches his eyes and positively _slinks_ around the table, eliciting stares and waves and winks that he ignores, ducking his head, not wanting to interrupt Combeferre’s speech, it seems—and he slips down into the empty chair beside Enjolras at the back of the room. If the air sent up a thrill when Grantaire walked in, it positively purrs now, thrumming with the sight of him, the proximity, the smell. Sweat and oil paints and lime aftershave.

“Has Combeferre engineered a coup?” Grantaire asks lowly, his lips practically in Enjolras’ ear.

“Where have you been?” Enjolras hisses back. He leans away and looks him up and down with disgust, rubbing hard at his ear where Grantaire’s breath has touched it, hot and sticky.

“Around,” says Grantaire. He smiles, sweetly. “Why aren’t you giving your own speech, dear leader?”

“I’m not—” Enjolras says, before his eyes go narrow. “How can you know it’s my speech?”

“I believe I heard the phrase ‘slobbering, quailing Legitimist bastards’ as I walked in. That may have given it away.”

Enjolras lets out a long huff of breath, rubbing at his temples, elbows on the table.

“What are you doing here, Grantaire?” he asks.

Grantaire opens his mouth but doesn’t seem to know how to answer the question. He tilts his head to one side and looks up at Enjolras, leaned forward on the table. He’s much too close, much too close. Enjolras looks pointedly away.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that politics clearly hold no interest for you. You haven’t bothered to attend a single meeting in three months. France is reaching a boiling point and we have all become more determined to do something about it by the hour—all but you. You have stayed away in our most critical moments. We are plotting a revolution, Grantaire, and we need every able-bodied man we can get, and as a member of our club, it is your duty to help us, it is your duty to care, and yet you do not. So we come here? Why bother? You are not one of us. You cannot live with one foot in the door. You cannot be a part of Les Amis unless you plan to be one of us fully.”

Enjolras’ voice has risen above a whisper now, and though Combeferre has continued with his speech, heads have turned in their direction.

Enjolras is snarling. Grantaire is looking at him, looking on the verge of helpless laughter.

“You are quite striking when you’re angry,” Grantaire says. His voice is soft, drawing Enjolras back down to his level. “And you are angry so often. You have such glorious, vengeful fire in you and I am but a moth. You should know that I could never stay away by choice. I _would_ never.”

“Then where have you been?”

Grantaire shakes his head.

“I reserve the right to my secrets,” he says.

“You have told Combeferre, at least.”

The heaviness grows behind the smirk in Grantaire’s eyes.

“I… I have. Yes.”

Enjolras’ heart drops. Who else has Grantaire confided in? Because surely it cannot be solely Combeferre. Grantaire and Combeferre hardly have anything to do with one another.

Bahorel? Jehan? Joly, surely. Bossuet, by extension.

“Enjolras,” says Grantaire, and suddenly all of his sardonicism is gone, suddenly he is no longer smiling. His lips have parted and his eyes are pleading, pained. “Please.”

“No, it’s quite alright,” says Enjolras. “You are right. You have the right to your own secrets.”

Grantaire’s hand is on Enjolras’ wrist now, strong and thick and surprisingly cold. Enjolras looks up.

Green eyes. Green eyes. Green eyes. Muddy green eyes. Wide pupils. Clear whites.

“I would tell you if I didn’t think it so unwise,” says Grantaire. “I swear it.”

“I’m certain you would,” says Enjolras—and shoves back his chair, stands, and claps for the end of Combeferre’s speech.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for more drug use than usual in this chapter. but i gotta say i have absolutely no idea how to smoke opium and my spoons are not aligned to research it so here's my best guess. the genre of this fic is officially "fucked-up hurt/comfort."
> 
> also when jehan says that unintelligible thing, he's saying 一个朋友, which means "a friend" in mandarin chinese. i don't speak any french whatsoever, so my horrible french pinyin is a sight to behold.
> 
> the poem at the end is the beginning of the first sonnet of edmund spenser's "amoretti"
> 
> and while we're doing notes, i forgot to mention earlier on that the title of this fic comes from the song "bloodletting (the vampire song)" by concrete blonde

Jehan swoops in when the meeting begins to unwind and Grantaire is looking forlornly down at the table. The smell of Enjolras—of his blood, of his flesh, of his wet muscles—is thick in the air, teetering on the edge of unbearable, as Enjolras argues with the man to his left, his heart racing strong and hard. Grantaire’s been distracting himself by trying to convince his body that it’s the wine that it wants, the absinthe, the spirits—their smells are even stronger, sharper—and he does want a drink, he wants a drink more than he cares to admit even to himself; he wants a drink so badly he can feel his chest aching with something that feels almost like loneliness. It’s been working well enough—well enough, but now his body is only a pulsing ache of _want, want, want_ , and he doesn’t know how much longer he can stand it when Enjolras is sitting beside him and Enjolras smells so _good_.

And so when someone—it’s Jehan; he knows _his_ smell by heart now: incense and wet earth and dust—comes and grips his shoulder and whispers, “I’m going to the opium den; come,” in his ear, R is up like a shot, his chair scraping back.

Enjolras looks around.

“Leaving already?” he asks. It’s an accusation. Grantaire smiles.

“I fear I’ll melt like Icarus’ wings should I stay too long by your side, dear leader,” he says, and Enjolras’ teeth show between his lips.

“R is accompanying me on an errand I must run,” Jehan says, before adding, more softly, “You oughtn’t be so hard on him.”

Now it’s Grantaire’s turn to scowl. Enjolras squints at them.

“Take care,” he says.

“And you,” says Jehan, and before Grantaire can say anything at all, he’s being steered from the room by the bony poet, who is surprisingly strong.

They find themselves out on the street, where a light rain is falling. It smells like wet wool, and half the lamps have gone out. Jehan tucks his head under the hood of his cloak.

“Cold,” he remarks.

“A welcome change after that stuffy room,” says Grantaire. “My belly is full fit to burst and yet I could have drunk all of them dry. I could smell all of them.”

 _Enjolras, particularly_ , he doesn’t say.

Jehan smoothes his thumb over his friend’s shoulder, drawing a little circle, pulling him closer.

“Oh, mon ami,” he says. “Your situation will improve. It already has.”

Grantaire says nothing.

They walk.

It’s a ways to the opium den that Jehan likes best; it’s in the seedier part of the city, where the houses lean on one another for support and whores prowl the corners with shiny eyes. A shirtless boy who can hardly be more than eleven years old tries to solicit them as they pass.

“A third, monsieurs?” he asks, slyly.

Jehan pauses in his tracks, eyebrows creasing in the middle, mouth falling open.

“You are a child—” he starts, but Grantaire says, “Hush, Jehan,” and takes three francs from the pocket of his green vest.

“Don’t give these to anybody.” His voice is low as he passes the coins to the child. “They are yours.”

Like a cat batting the nose of a dog, the boy reaches out slowly, closes his small fist around the money, and then turns tail and runs. Jehan can feel Grantaire vibrating against him—laughing, trembling, or both.

“That was kind,” he says.

“I have too much money these days,” says Grantaire, “and too few vices to spend it on.”

“Have you been painting?”

“No, I have been dying. I don’t intend to go having spent all on goats and chickens.”

Jehan has never been good at saying things aloud. He doesn’t try now.

They come upon the opium den moments later. Its entrance is sunken below the ground under a butcher’s shop and has a dripping staircase leading down to it. In the small space, Grantaire can smell the smoke: thick and dark and floral, like the burning of wet, honeyed sand.

Jehan knocks on the black door.

“Who’s there?” calls a gruff voice.

Jehan says something that sounds to Grantaire like, “Egoe paingioux.” And the locks slide open.

Inside is an array of settees, armchairs, loveseats, pillows, blankets—all mismatched and well-worn. The den is a maze of small, cloistered rooms full of loungers in various states of lethargy. Some are sprawled alone; some are leaned in, head to head, talking quietly; some are cuddled up together on couches. Grantaire likes the place immediately.

Jehan murmurs something in the ear of a small, dark attendant, who leads them back to a room with a door that closes. There’s a threadbare tapestry on the wall, a table, and two large, squashy sofas on which the attendant invites them to spread out, taking Jehan’s cloak from the room. Moment later, he returns with two clean pipes, two trays, and four drawstring bags. Jehan passes him a handful of coins.

“How much?” Grantaire asks. His voice seems too loud in the quiet.

“I have paid for you,” says Jehan, and then bows his head at the attendant. The attendant bows back before turning and leaving, closing the door behind him.

“There was no need to—” Grantaire starts.

“Hush. I appreciate the presence of your company,” says Jehan. “Now, let me show you how this is done.”

Jehan’s wiry fingers might have been made for the act of packing an opium pipe. He shakes tobacco from one of his drawstring bags out onto his tray, and then takes the other, smaller bag to dust the dried leaves over with a fine, yellowish powder. He fills the bowl of his pipe with this mixture, neatly, delicately, careful not to shake any of what Grantaire guesses to be the opium from the sticky tobacco.

Grantaire’s own fingers have tremors in them that send them shaking like the last loose leaves on a tree in autumn. He gets powder and tobacco all over his tray.

“No fear, mon ami,” says Jehan, and presses a fingertip down into a pile of loose powder. He lifts it as an offering and says, “Pull down your lower lip.”

It’s not long after Jehan spreads the opium on Grantaire’s gum that R’s eyes scrunch up. His face fills with something like bewilderment. He leans back on the sofa and blinks down at his hands, which rest on his thighs. Jehan laughs at him.

“How odd,” says Grantaire. “I don’t even believe I’ve swallowed any of the stuff. How does it work?”

“Magic,” says Jehan, grinning.

“Magic, indeed.”

“You like it?”

“Too soon to say, perhaps. Injecting Joly’s morphine makes me miserable almost immediately. It dulls my thoughts somewhat, which is why I continue with it, but it does make me miserable. This method of usage may not have that same effect. It is too soon to say. I feel warm right now. That is comforting. Like wine. I miss—I _long_ for wine. I doubt there is a substitute. Not when every pagan has a god dedicated to it; not when the Christian God Himself sent His son to tell us to drink it. It seems a sick irony to me now, more than it ever has: wine into blood. But I suppose wine leads to blood when unchecked—that has always been my philosophy, that there is darkness in all good things. There has always been darkness in drunkenness, as much as there is light. There is blood where there is wine. I should know; I was raised on blood and wine both. My mother died. My sister died. My father always looked to complete the set and kill me, too, but he couldn’t do it: he was too good a man. My father was a Catholic as well as a drunkard. Blood and wine. And when I left the blood, I followed the wine. I worshipped Dionysus. I thought there could be ecstasy without misery. I was wrong. And now there is only blood. It all balances out. I wish I had died when I had both, you know. I wish my father had had the stomach to kill me—”

“Grantaire!” says Jehan, sharply.

“—but now I am here, alive, and covered with death,” Grantaire finishes. He smiles and leans forward, elbows on knees.

“Oh, look,” he says. “I told you: anything derived from the poppy flower makes me miserable.”

“No, no, mon ami,” says Jehan, getting up. He steps around the table and comes to sit by Grantaire’s side, draping an arm around his waist, laying his head down on his shoulder. “No, no. You will not be miserable. You will be cheered. I will cheer you. It is your own mind that saddens you. I will change it. I will. Now, tell me, what did you think of the meeting today?”

“I was rather distracted by Enjolras.”

Jehan giggles. “Indeed. It is the first you’ve seen of him in months. Is he changed?”

“Not at all. He is beautiful as when I first heard him speak,” says Grantaire. He smiles, faintly. “He was angry with me for being absent.”

“He missed your presence.”

“He counts every member of every meeting; of course he did.”

“No, no, he missed you in particular, in specific. He’s been frustrated by your absence for months now. Courfeyrac tells me he asked of you again and again.”

Grantaire pulls out of Jehan’s loose grip, his face twisted up in pain.

“You lie, Prouvaire. You lie. Why must you give me unfounded… unfounded happiness? Enjolras cares nothing for—”

Jehan is reaching forward, taking Grantaire’s shoulders in his hands. “No, no, I would never lie to you—you may ask Courfeyrac yourself. Enjolras cares for you.”

“Enjolras despises me. If he asked of me, it was because he was angry I hadn’t been attending meetings.”

“Only because he was disappointed in you. He believes more of you than you know.”

“I… I doubt this,” says Grantaire, but there is a shine to his eyes now, an upward twist to his lips, a straightness returned to his spine.

“Doubt all you like. You are loved and cared for by many, and Enjolras is one of those who cares.”

Grantaire doesn’t say anything. He’s shaking his head, looking doubting but unmistakably pleased.

“Incidentally,” says Jehan. “I am another.”

Grantaire blinks up at him, a small smile spreading over his face.

“I care for you, too,” he says. “More than you know.”

Jehan nods, beckoning with his silver-ringed fingers, arms spread—and Grantaire shifts over on the sofa, a bit abashedly, to embrace him. He shuts his eyes, breathing in Jehan’s warm, earthy smell. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it did once. Hearing Jehan’s heart thudding in his chest no longer fills Grantaire with so much agony, wanting, needing. It still aches, yes, but that ache is muffled by love and familiarity.

When they pull away, Jehan says, “Would you still like to…” and gestures at the table, spread with their waiting supplies.

“Yes,” says Grantaire. “I would, if you would still bear with my unhindered dialogues. It is painful to retain the ability to be embarrassed at what one says. I have that ability far too often lately. I have it now. I don’t enjoy it, but I am afraid you will resent my losing it if we are to indulge.”

“I will only resent it if you resent me losing my own inhibitions,” says Jehan.

“I would never.”

“Take your pipe, then; I will light it for you.”

Grantaire has never been much of a smoker. He will take a cigarillo to be polite if someone has one rolled and is offering it up, but will mostly hold onto it, inhaling from it only occasionally; and he finds himself turning Bossuet down at the offers to have a pipe with him after dinner. He’s never seen the appeal of tobacco in the same way that most men seem to. Therefore, when Jehan takes a spill from its holder by the gaslight on the wall, lights it, and brings it back over to touch the pipe in Grantaire’s teeth, the first breath in feels like fire slipping down Grantaire’s throat. He holds the smoke in at Jehan’s instruction, feeling it go cool and easy in his lungs—but the moment he lets a bit spill out of his nose, he’s done for, sucking in air and coughing until he feels he might retch.

Jehan is leaning against the wall, smoking his own pipe evenly, and laughing at him when Grantaire looks up, eyes streaming.

“Why would one subject himself to smoking pipes of only tobacco?” Grantaire asks, seriously.

Jehan holds up a finger at him for a moment, waiting, and then blows a long stream of smoke rings down into Grantaire’s face. Grantaire winces.

“Some would say the same about wine,” Jehan says.

“Wine serves a purpose,” grumbles Grantaire. “Tobacco is merely a leaf.”

“Well, go on, try again with this,” Jehan insists. “You’re letting it burn to waste.”

Grantaire puts the pipe to his lips again and inhales. The initial impact of the few grains that Jehan put onto his gum is wearing thin, leaving a warm thrum in its place—it hardly feels like anything at all. He hopes deeply that this is not the extent of the opium’s effect. He could achieve better results with a cup of hot tea on a cold day.

It’s not. Ten minutes of coughing and determined inhaling later and Grantaire, finishing the pipe, is splayed back on the couch with his eyelids drooping. He feels as though he’s been placed into the most buoyant of salt water, all the small aches and pains that he lives with, that he forgets about, having disappeared; his limbs have all gone quiet, his body both heavy and impossibly light.

“I like this,” he tells Jehan, who is sitting crosslegged on the opposite sofa, re-packing both pipes.

“Better than the morphine, yes?”

“Yes, although it may just be the increased quantity. Or perhaps my state of mind. It is a great comfort to have you here.”

Jehan gets up with the pipes, smiling. He walks over, taking a spill from the gaslight on his way, and settles down beside Grantaire on the sofa, shoulder to shoulder.

“Always a pleasure, Capital R,” he says, and lights Grantaire’s second pipe, then his own.

They sit in silence for a while: Jehan blowing complex chains of smoke rings up at the ceiling, Grantaire progressively wilting into Jehan’s shoulder.

By the end of the pipe, he’s struggling to keep his eyes open.

“Mm, Jehan,” he murmurs, when he inhales the last ashes. “M’tired.”

Jehan laughs and shifts his arm around his friend, long fingers winding through his curls.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“Beautiful,” says Grantaire, leaning into his touch. He does. He feels warm and sleepy and impossibly comfortable, comforted. It’s amazing. Better than wine.

Jehan leans down and presses a kiss to Grantaire’s forehead. Grantaire, his eyes shut, smiles.

“Je t'aime,” Jehan says.

“Moi aussi, je t’aime.”

“You may sleep, if you wish.”

“Stay,” says Grantaire.

“I would never leave you.”

“Hold me.”

“I won’t let you float off.”

“Mmm.”

Grantaire’s breathing hard now, halfway to snoring.

“Happy ye leaves,” Jehan whispers, still stroking Grantaire’s hair, “when as those lily hands, which hold my life in their dead-doing might, shall handle you and hold in love’s soft bands like captives trembling at the victor’s sight. And happy lines, on which with starry light those lamping eyes will deign sometimes to look…”


	12. Chapter 12

Grantaire wakes up with Jehan stretched out beside him, his head on R’s chest, drooling onto the green-striped fabric of his vest. He stirs as Grantaire does, letting out a little moan of awakening as his eyes come open, confused and sticky and bloodshot. As his spine curls in a little stretch, his crotch pushes against Grantaire’s leg—and Grantaire’s face goes blank, feeling something hard there, feeling the heat.

He looks down at Jehan, blinking, and Jehan looks back, a smile spreading slowly as he becomes more fully awake and realizes his predicament. He snorts with laughter at R’s bemused face.

“Apologies, mon ami,” he says, sitting up and rearranging himself into a more modest position, putting some space between himself and Grantaire. “It’s been a while. My unconscious mind is quite the rake.”

Grantaire is laughing as well, shaking his head.

“No need for apologies; I was merely… surprised. I understand, for it’s been more than a while for myself, and it’s often rather unbearable—although, hold up, hadn’t you taken up with Montparnasse?”

Jehan shook his head.

“I had. No longer.”

“No longer? Whyever not?”

“Dogfighting,” says Jehan, and despite all of his ease in the discussion they’ve just had, he says this word as though he can hardly bear it. “I’ve discovered that he makes money dogfighting. I cannot abide by such cruelty.”

Grantaire sighs.

“Perhaps he… Perhaps your leaving will persuade him otherwise.”

“I doubt it. He is rather a narcissist. It was one of the things I enjoyed about him. He took nothing too seriously. Our fling was that: a fling. He cares nothing deep for me.”

“Who could not care for you?”

“A narcissist. A _dogfighter_. Anyone who encourages animals go to their deaths—it is such callousness.”

Grantaire’s twists.

“What is it?” Jehan asks him.

“You have watched me bring animals to their deaths as well. Are you not disgusted by me? Frankly, _I_ am disgusted by myself.”

“You kill out of necessity, Grantaire. You could commit far worse acts than harming a few goats, if you didn’t choose to rebel against the nature of your condition. And yet you still feel guilt for it, even when you choose the most difficult path, the most moral path. Montparnasse watches harm come to animals for sport. There is no necessity in his wrong-doing. He enjoys witnessing and causing brutality.” Jehan touches Grantaire’s shoulder. “ _You_ —no, you are a good man.”

“I am neither good nor a man.”

“You are a moral and intelligent and well-meaning creature, then. Better than Montparnasse by tenfold.”

“‘Creature’ I won’t deny. The rest—”

Jehan surges forward, wraps his fingers around the back of Grantaire’s head, and kisses him straight on the mouth.

For the first moment, Grantaire is frozen, eyes open—but then his hands travel instinctively to Jehans waist, his eyes close and, suddenly, unexpectedly, he exists on a plane where there is nothing but burning, needy, darkness: the feeling of Jehan’s body as it twists under his, as he pushes it down onto the couch, hot friction rising up between them, a moan escaping from Jehan’s lips—and it feels so natural, more natural than anything in the world. Grantaire is boiling over with _need_ , his teeth grit in the back of his mouth as he grinds his hips down on Jehan’s, gasping.

But in the air that he sucks in, there is something more. Something _too much_.

The smell.

Jehan’s heart is thudding underneath him. Blood is surging through the bony little poet, rushing just under the surface of his skin, over his wiry muscles, through his chest, pooling down under his belly, and Grantaire can smell him. He can smell every inch of him, of his warm, living, twisting flesh.

And before he can stop himself, he breaks their kiss, skids his mouth down over Jehan’s jawline, grazes his fang over the soft skin of his throat, and bites.

Grantaire hears Jehan moan, feels him buck up underneath him, before the last remaining thread of his consciousness is goes and he loses himself completely in the ebb and flow, the pulse, the crash and draw, the sucking of blood. It is hot and thick and indescribably _alive_ , the taste of it such an intense rush of pleasure that Grantaire wonders for half a moment whether he’s dying, whether his heart has given out on him—but, no, it hasn’t. It joins; it syncs up with Jehan’s. It thrashes frantically, like the ending of a symphony in _fortissimo_ , except it doesn’t end. It goes on. The excitement goes on. He is drinking life. He is drinking pure life. His insides glow bright red.

He comes to when Jehan breaks his nose.

His jaw unclenches momentarily—just long enough for Grantaire to gasp air—and then it’s over. It’s over. His face is covered with blood—Jehan’s, his own—and it’s a mask of pure agony as he stumbles backwards, away, tripping over the table as he goes and landing squarely on his ass.

Grantaire lays back and lets out a strangled noise like a sob, bunching his fists in his hair, pulling at it until the pain brings him fully back to himself. The ceiling is swimming.

Jehan is panting, raggedly, again and again, “Alright. It’s alright. It’s alright.”

When Grantaire trusts himself enough to sit up and look at him, Jehan is the color of fresh milk—so white that he’s almost blue. His eyes are huge in his face and one hand is at his throat. The other is clenched in a fist, trembling. For a long moment, Grantaire only stares at him.

“It’s alright,” Jehan says again, his eyelids fluttering as he struggles to focus on Grantaire.

“Y-you’re right,” says Grantaire, thickly through his broken nose. “It’s alright. You… you will be just fine.”

When he collects himself enough to stand up, to come near, he doesn’t bother to apologize. He knows it won’t be enough, and he’s far too scared to waste any time. He tucks an arm under Jehan’s shoulders and secures him, their hands interlocked, and then he hoists him up until they’re standing. It’s a position he knows well. He’s been on the receiving end of it far too many times not to.

Jehan whimpers.

“Come,” Grantaire says. His voice sounds terrified even to his own ears. “You can do it. We will… we will go to Joly and he will fix you. Come now.” They take a step. “He will fix you up and you will sit on the couch and eat chicken soup and Bossuet will wrap you in a quilt and you will be safe and well, Jehan, mon ami, you hear me? You—”

But Jehan has slumped to one side, his eyes closed.

His heart is still beating, sluggishly.

Grantaire will not give in to tears. He will not. Not when Jehan needs him. He bends down, instead, breathing hard, and settles an arm under Jehan’s knees, staggering a little as he stands upright with him in his arms. Jehan is thin, but he is tall.

“Alright,” says Grantaire to him, even though, in probability, his words fall on deaf ears. “Alright. Come now, mon ami. It’s alright. We will go to Joly.”

He fumbles his way out of the door, down the hall, and through the maze of rooms. Everything smells of people, of blood, of opium—but he gets to the front door unabated, until the grizzled man who let them in rises from his chair in front of the door and shakes his head at them.

“No, no,” he says. He has a long grey beard and hard eyes. “No, you cannot leave with him as he is. You will attract police to our door if they see that—”

Grantaire’s lips pull back, his nose crinkles up, his fangs flash in the light. A low growl rumbles from deep in his chest, echoing around the room like a roll of thunder with impossible, otherworldly volume.

The man with the beard steps back, unlocks the door, opens it, and gets out of the way within seconds.

Out on the street, Grantaire runs. He doesn’t care who sees him, not that he much ever has—but he finds now that he covers blocks with three strides, that grisettes scatter out of his way as he flashes past like a shot bullet—and he finds, strangely, as he runs, that there are currents the air. There are streams through which the wind streaks between the buildings; there are places where gusts hit your back and you feel, for a moment, as though—

The cold night air whistles through Grantaire’s fur. He is flying with Jehan clutched in his claws.

\---

Joly wakes abruptly to his name being shouted out from downstairs. The front door slams. Footsteps pound up the stairs.

“ _Joly!_ ” Grantaire’s voice roars again, and Joly is up from the mattress, stuffing his feet into his slippers, gathering his spectacles from the nightstand.

Grantaire flings the bedroom door open before he can.

“Downstairs,” he says. He’s gasping for breath, his nose swollen to three times its usual size, blood smeared beneath it. “Jehan.”

“What?” Joly asks, still half-asleep, but Grantaire has turned and is pelting headlong down the steps again, and so Joly follows, quickly but bewilderedly.

Jehan is lying in the front hallway, pale as paper. Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of his body and the bodies of all the various livestock that Joly has removed from this hallways, but he knows immediately what has happened to him.

“He’s alive?” he asks Grantaire, pushing him out of the way on his path to Jehan.

“Yes. Yes, he’s…” says Grantaire and then, finally, he begins to weep, the knifeblade rising in his throat, hot tears streaming down his cheeks. “I haven’t killed him, Joly. Please tell me I haven’t killed him.”

“I can’t tell you for sure,” says Joly. His hand is at Jehan’s throat, his fingers brushing the wounds, taking the faint pulse.

He beckons with a brusque jolt of his head to Grantaire. “Help me move him to the drawing room.”

They settle Jehan on the couch just as Bossuet is coming downstairs. Jehan’s head lolls to the side.

“My God,” says Bossuet, when he comes in. That’s all he says. He stands stock-still in the doorway.

“Get me a wet rag, Juste, and a bowl of pepper, and the smelling salts from my kit in the pantry,” Joly says without turning around.

Bossuet goes, wordless.

“Grantaire,” says Joly, “I need you to answer some questions for me.”

“Anything,” says Grantaire. His voice is hardly more than a whisper.

“You remember the night you were attacked?”

“Some of it.”

“Where were you?”

“The Corinthe. Outside of the Corinth. On the street. Flor—the barmaid had thrown me out.”

“You were drunk.”

“I… yes.”

“How much so?”

Grantaire heaves a sigh.

“I was only half-conscious.”

“And the man who attacked you…”

“He came down the street. I didn’t move. I watched him walk up—no. No, he walked halfway up the street and then appeared at my side. I thought I was seeing things. I blamed it on drunkenness. But, no; I know now that he appeared at my side. We—” Grantaire stops, all the breath gone from his lungs with that word. _We. We._ “We can move very quickly.”

“And then?”

“He bit me.”

Bossuet returns then with a bowl full of powdered black pepper, a vial, and wet rag on his arm. He crosses the room without a glance at Grantaire and hands them to Joly, who takes them.

Before using either, he asks Grantaire, “What happened then?”

Grantaire shuts his eyes, trying to climb back inside the memory, the darkness, the streetlamps, the _bite_ —but that’s all he remembers.

“I don’t know,” he admits, more tears welling up, prickling. “I believe I… I fell asleep. I was very drunk. I’m… Joly, I’m so sorry. I don’t know.”

“Well,” says Joly, “I suppose if Prouvaire wakes, we ought to keep our distance until we can be sure.”

“We can be sure…?”

“That you haven’t infected him. You’ve bitten him. Perhaps, like rabies, the disease can be spread with a bite.”

“Oh,” says Grantaire. “Oh, God…”

“He’s bitten you, Camille,” Bossuet chimes in, “and you’ve not shown any symptoms.”

“He only grazed me. He didn’t get the chance to… to suck. But you’re right; that is a good sign.”

As Joly takes up the rag and begins swiping at Jehan’s forehead, his cheeks, his eyelids, Grantaire is tugging at his hair so hard that some of it is coming uprooted. He looks nearly as white as the poet.

“You should have killed me,” he hisses at Bossuet. “You should have killed me before I had the chance to do this.”

Bossuet glares at him.

“I am not a violent man,” he says. “It is not in my nature. Don’t put the blame of Jehan’s injury on me.”

“No, _no_ ,” says Grantaire. “No, I don’t blame you in any way. It is my fault entirely. But… oh God. I wish I were dead.”

“Quiet, Grantaire,” Joly snarls, throwing the rag down on the floor. “Your self-pitying is no use.”

So Grantaire bites his lip and resigns himself to suffering silently.

Joly closes and covers Jehan’s mouth; he holds the bowl of pepper directly underneath his nose. A moment later, Jehan sneezes. His eyelids twitch, and then flutter open. He squints—and then sneezes again.

“J-Joly?” Jehan’s voice is faint, but his bloodshot eyes are lucid.

“Oh, thank God,” Grantaire breathes.

“Prouvaire,” says Joly. “How do you feel?”

Jehan shuts his eyes again.

“Tired,” he murmurs.

“Stay awake, Prouvaire,” says Joly, hurriedly taking up the washcloth again in one hand, dabbing Jehan’s face with it. He unscrews the cap of the vial in his lap with the other. “Stay awake.”

Joly gets the smelling salts open and holds them up to Prouvaire’s nose until the poet splutters, blinking furiously.

“What—?”

“Smelling salts,” says Joly. “Again.”

And Jehan wrinkles his nose up, but inhales from the vial again, dutifully. He catches sight of Grantaire as his vision swims more fully into focus.

“R,” he says.

“Jehan,” says Grantaire, taking a tentative step forward. He’s clutching his hands at his side in tight little fists, and Jehan is willing to bet anything that his fingernails are working to draw blood. He considers saying something to him, something like, “I’m sorry,” or, “It wasn’t your fault,” but before he can, his view is going black again from the sides inward, and all he can see is Joly’s cheek, and then the premature lines around Joly’s mouth, and then nothing at all.

Grantaire hears himself make a noise like a kicked dog as Jehan collapses again, his head nodding down onto his chest, shoulders crumpling inwards. Joly leans forward to catch him.

“Joly…” Grantaire whimpers.

“Quiet, Grantaire,” says Joly, pressing his ear up against Prouvaire’s chest.

_Thump-thump. Thump… thump. Thump… Thump-thump. Thump…_

_Thump._

Silence.

Joly waits for a long moment, not daring to breath, not daring to shift at all lest he miss a beat—but, no, no. No, Prouvaire’s heart has stopped beating.

Joly doesn’t say a word.

He clambers to his feet for a better angle, and presses down hard on Prouvaire’s abdomen. Nothing happens. He lifts and presses again. Prouvaire’s body is limp, lifeless.

“Oh my God,” says Bossuet, clutching the doorway.

Joly thumps a fist down onto Jehan’s chest—that’s when Grantaire steps forward.

He knows what he has to do. He isn’t sure how he knows—muscle memory, perhaps, or something out of the dream of his first night, the night outside of the Corinthe—but he knows.

“Move,” he says, and edges Joly out of the way.

It’s a simple matter to bite open his own wrist. Grantaire is no stranger to self-inflicted wounds; he owns a box-cutter, which he keeps in his trunk with his paints and his brushes, and which he ostensibly uses to open the boxes that he canvases come in. It is an open secret that he also uses this box-cutter to slash his paintings when he’s in a fit of depression. It is a real secret that he has used this box-cutter on his thighs, on his calves, on his chest and, twice, when the world has gotten too much, on his wrists. They bear deep scars already. He sinks his teeth through one.

He hears Joly’s little exclamation of horror and pays it no heed—he straddles Jehan’s lap and presses his wrist to the poet’s slack mouth.

And amazingly, horrifyingly, the corpse latches on with its lips and drinks.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry for spamming the les mis page with updates--im hella sick and fanfiction is good medicine.
> 
> ...also i made myself laugh while writing this thinking about how "fear nothing for my proclivities" is canon-era jehan-speak for "don't kinkshame me"

Enjolras startles awake at the crack of a gunshot, looking frantically around the darkened, empty room until he’s satisfied that the sound has come from his dream. He falls back into his pillows with a sigh, smoothing the edge of his blanket between his fingers—it’s some sort of wool blend, thick and soft and comforting. He shuts his eyes, tries to focus on the feeling, push the remaining tendrils of the dream from his mind.

_There is a barricade, a barricade like those he’s been sketching on the corners of his notes. A towering wall of furniture. There are shouts from behind it. And then men pouring over the top, men with guns. Men in uniform. The National Guard. And there, amongst their ranks, is Madam Hucheloup, brandishing a revolver, her gold teeth shining in the light… And he tries to ask her what she’s doing there; tries to open his mouth, but it won’t open. He’s rooted in place, unable to move, and Madam Hucheloup is lost among the surging wall of bodies, the Guard rushing forward… And he tries to move, tries to yell out to Combeferre behind him, but his jaw is stuck so tight—and as he stands there, the Guard keeps coming, keeps coming until they’re roaring down on him, knocking him to the grounf, their feet trodding him into the cobblestones, squashing him like a Christmas orange left on the road in front of horses—and their guns ring out amidst the unmistakable cries of his friends—shots fired, dozens of them, and then silence._

_“Long live the Revolution!” cries a voice that he recognizes._

And that was when he had woken, the final report of a gun startling him awake.

Enjolras turns and buries his face in the pillows.

\---

A few streets over, Prouvaire awakes with a similar start. He’s wrapped in Grantaire’s arms, and when R feels him jolt, hears the thin, hungry little whine come from his friend’s throat, he holds tighter and whispers, “Shh. Shh.”

“R?”

Jehan’s crushed up against someone’s chest, someone who smells like opium smoke and the rich, mineral tang of blood. There’s a beating heart by his ear, pounding like a church’s bell—a welcoming, an alert.

“Yes.” A heavy hand strokes his head.

“Oh my God,” whimpers Jehan. “Oh my God, R, I’m so hungry.”

“Here,” says Grantaire, and shifts slightly, giving Jehan a view of the room they’re in. They’re in a bed, surrounded by a sea of canvases all turned to the wall, a desk with a collection of vials and syringes, something dark thrown over the curtain rod on the window.

Grantaire pulls down his undershirt, the first three buttons already undone, and stretches his throat by Jehan’s face. It’s an offering.

There’s no question about it—no ability to resist. Prouvaire bites.

A flood of relief, of warmth, of pure joy fills up Jehan’s chest as he drinks, Grantaire’s pulse fluttering under him, his veins going taut and then relaxing, taut and then relaxed, taut and then relaxed. He tastes like salt water and something sweet, and as Jehan bites again, less tentatively, and breaks through to the artery, a gush of golden, glorious, mysterious, beautiful _life_ comes pouring into his mouth and he hears himself moan with pleasure as though from far away.

Grantaire’s hips buck up. He melts, sighs, soft and breathy, and Jehan responds, shifting his mouth around the wound as he would a pair of lips.

There’s something wrong about Grantaire’s blood—it’s too cold, too thick, too slow. And, though because of this Jehan never loses himself, never gives in to pure vampirism and pure unconsciousness, he comes close. He can feel the darkness waiting for him, beckoning, but R’s blood isn’t enough. It’s not enough. He pulls harder.

There comes a point when Grantaire’s heart starts to splutter.

“Enough,” he gasps, pushing Jehan away with the strength he has left. Jehan goes, reluctantly. “Enough.”

They’re both panting, shaking. They collapse into one another, noses to throats, eyelashes to jawlines.

“Mother of Christ,” says Jehan, when he can speak again. His stomach is warm and full. “Mother of Christ. You ought to have done this to me sooner, Capital R.”

Grantaire’s chest rumbles as he chuckles, shaking his head. His nose is swollen and purple from the break that Jehan had caused it the night before.

“I suppose it isn’t all bad,” he says. “But are you not horrified? Are you not disgusted with seeing death and—”

“‘All bad,’” Jehan repeats, incredulously. “‘All bad.’ R, that was more pleasurable than… I would willfully renounce sunlight for that.”

“Good,” says Grantaire. “Because you have.”

“Ohhh, God of heaven,” Jehan moans, stretching out onto his back, completely ignoring Grantaire’s comment. He’s visibly hard. “When can we do it again?”

Grantaire laughs a little, flicking his eyes down meaningfully to where Jehan’s trousers have gone tight.

Jehan raises an eyebrow, but makes no effort to hide himself.

“You are an incredibly unusual man, Jean Prouvaire.”

“I am a Romantic.”

“With a capital ‘R,’” Grantaire says, and can’t help but snigger.

“Indeed.” Jehan grins. He tilts his head. “We never got to…”

His hand is on Grantaire’s chest, stroking. Grantaire doesn’t have the willpower to push him off, no matter how unnerving their whole situation is.

“Because I _killed_ you.”

“I lived. I am here. Better than ever.”

“How can you possibly…?” Grantaire shakes his head. “You’ve just woken up.”

“I am _so alive_ right now. I fear I will burst from it. And unless you have reservations—”

“I have none. Though you ought to.”

Jehan grimaces, new fangs somehow glistening in light that isn’t there.

“R,” he says. “Please. Fear nothing for my proclivities; you are my friend and shall always be no matter what form we take.”

“Your proclivities…” Grantaire snorts. “I was ugly as a man, and now I am uglier as a creature, in body and soul.”

Jehan whines, pushing himself up closer to Grantaire’s body, smoothing a hand down his chest and over the soft curve of his belly. R shivers.

“You are lovely.”

“I am hideous. I have hurt you.”

“You have healed me.”

Grantaire says nothing.

“Drink from me,” Jehan whispers in his ear. “I know you are famished. I can feel you.”

He stretches his throat, and the smell of him rises up from it—loamy, heady, warm. His blue veins are pulsing under the healing puncture wounds.

Grantaire breathes in. And then he sighs out.

“Take off your trousers,” he says.

\---

Marius is still in love. The day is hot and humid and dank, wisps of vapor rising up off the dirty street, and there are gnats in his face and his undershirt is drenched in sweat, but he doesn’t care one bit. He is in love—and she is missing.

“You can’t know what it _feels_ like,” he’s saying to Courfeyrac, who is walking along jauntily beside him, swinging his cane, looking high amused. “It is as though God has designed her for me, and me for her. She is perfect. And now she is gone.”

“You’ve been repeating this to me for months and yet you have never spoken to her. Are there no other birds for you, Marius? This one has clearly flown the coop.”

“I love her!” Marius cries. “You don’t understand.”

He pushes past him into the Musain at the end of this sentence, tearing at his hair. Courfeyrac swings the door shut behind himself with something of a skip in his step, shaking his head.

“What is it that Courf doesn’t understand, Marius?” It’s Feuilly, leaning back against the bar with his elbows.

“Many things,” Bahorel stage-whispers from beside him, and Courfeyrac leaps around Marius, grinning, to aim a mock-blow at Bahorel’s ear.

“Marius is in love,” he explains, taking up an elbow at the bar beside them, gesturing at their friend, who is standing wide-eyed before them. “He doesn’t believe that I understand love.”

Feuilly cackles; Bahorel guffaws.

“Have you not observed the intimacy of his relationship with…?” Feuilly asks, before hacking out a cough that sounds suspiciously like, ‘ _Ferre.’_

“Of course; of course I have! You mock me! But I tell you truly that we are soulmates, she and I; we are made for one another—and I have not seen her in months. I cannot find her.”

“And when was the last time you spoke with her?” asks Courfeyrac, slyly.

Marius falls silent.

It takes a moment for Feuilly and Bahorel to catch on—and then they are laughing again.

“You haven’t spoken to her?!”

“You are watching her from a distance!”

“Marius, I’m ashamed of you.”

“He fancies himself a knight who will rescue the princess from her tower.”

“Hush, hush,” says Marius, whose freckled ears are turning scarlet.

The abuse he will suffer at their hands will be worthwhile, he knows. Someday—someday soon—he will return here to the Musain with the girl (with _Cosette._ Cosette. Cosette.) at his side, and they will know, they will believe, they will understand. He knows this more deeply than he knows anything else. He has known this from the first moment that he saw her.  He knows that he will find her, and he knows that they will be together. God would not bring such determination, such fire into Marius’ heart had he meant for him never to meet Cosette.

Unless—unless she won’t have him. Unless she looks at him and all that she sees is a stranger.

This is almost unthinkable to Marius, but he has vowed to himself that if he speaks to her, and if she sees him, and if she is unaffected by the bond that he feels, then he will go—he will leave and he will never speak to her again.

He tugs at the fabric of his undershirt, over his chest, where his hear is racing. There must be something pathetic about the look on his face, because Courfeyrac steps forward and claps him on the shoulder.

“Come, Marius. We will have a drink and forget pretty girls for now.”

\---

But Marius doesn’t forget, and it’s a good thing that he doesn’t.

Cosette has returned. She has returned. He has seen her with Jondrette, and her face is burned into his mind. She was like a flash of light, like an opening in the clouds where the sun poked through, and her image shifts, smiling, in his mind’s eye every time that he blinks.

“Marius, wake up,” says a voice from behind him.

It’s Joly, a mug of wine in hand as he braces himself back against the bar, a bit unsteady on his feet already despite the meeting having just begun. Marius knows why—Grantaire, ever the scoundrel influence—is leaning beside him, grinning. Grantaire’s returned for good now apparently, despite… Well, Marius doesn’t want to think about the “despite”. He’s a Catholic.

“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” says Joly, lighting up his pipe.

Marius gapes, his mouth opening, and then closing again.

“Some wine,” Grantaire suggests, raising up an eyebrow as he fills a mug for Marius, “and say what’s going on.”

Marius shivers as he accepts the drink out of mere politeness—he won’t drink anything that Grantaire gives him, not anymore. Not that he faults him for his… his… Well, it’s just that you can’t be too sure with these types of things. It’s a slippery slope.

“A ghost…” He murmurs, shaking his head as he sits down at the nearby table. He feels weak in the knees. “Perhaps. She was just like a ghost to me.”

Grantaire puts his hand up over his heart and grins even wider, like the wolf who’s just spotted Little Red Riding Hood. His hooked canines— _They aren’t even canines_ , Marius thinks. _They are fangs. They are true fangs—_ peek out, just barely, gleaming.

“Oh, I am agog,” Grantaire purrs, sliding down into the seat beside Marius. Joly follows, giggling. “I am perfectly aghast, mon chѐr—who is this ‘she’? Who is the lucky woman who has won our Marius’ heart? Here stands our fearless leader—” He knocks his head in the direction of Enjolras, who scowls. “—plotting doom for the National Guard and yet Marius strides in like Don Juan, talking of love. There is something to be said for that. The great tragedy of Don Juan was his ignorance of the fact that death, indeed, is the great equalizer. And should you die in this little revolution of ours, your love shall mean nothing at all.”

Grantaire shoots a meaningful look over his shoulder. Enjolras is positively glowering at him.

“Your situation might be the plot of a great Greek tragedy,” Grantaire says to Marius, swiping Joly’s pipe from his hand and taking a long drag from it. The smoke that drifts from it is strange and sweet. Grantaire lets it billow from his nose.

“Put that out,” Enjolras snarls, appearing suddenly with his hands on the back of Grantaire’s chair. “Now. It goes to your heads.”

“He is not concerned,” Grantaire remarks to Joly, “with us turning Madam Hucheloup’s fine establishment into a drug den. Only with how we feature in his revolution.”

Joly holds his palms up, refusing to involve himself in an argument between these two.

“Marius,” says Enjolras. “No matter his—ahem— _charming_ personality, Grantaire is right.”

“Am I?” asks Grantaire, bemused.

“To a degree,” Enjolras amends. “It is true, Marius, that any of us might pay the ultimate price when the day comes. You must be prepared to accept that this is no sport, and that our full focus must be on the revolution. You cannot afford to be distracted. None of us can, or blood will run, and the darkness will go on.”

“Had you seen her today, you might know how it feels,” Marius counters. “You have not seen my Cosette. You cannot know—”

Enjolras snorts.

“I am serious,” says Marius. “Any man with eyes would love her. She is a burst of light—”

“Enjolras know nothing of love,” says Grantaire. “Do not hope to make him understand.”

“On the contrary,” Enjolras says, “I feel great love for my homeland, for France, for the French people. Who, incidentally, ought to be the subject of this meeting—”

“Because, if it is not, blood will run and the darkness will go on,” mocks Grantaire.

“Precisely.”

Grantaire takes a long, slow drag from Joly’s pipe. He holds the smoke, narrowing his eyes, until he says, “Have you not considered yourself as a cause of the blood?”

“If you mean the National Guard—”

“I mean your friends, Enjolras. You will kill them all.”

“They are fully aware of the dangers.”

“And yet they still go to their deaths. It is because they are loyal to you, you know. You lead them like fairy lights on a bog.”

“I lead nobody.”

“Nonsense,” Grantaire snorts. “Pure and utter nonsense. It would be impossible not to follow you. You blaze a path through the darkness behind you. You are a light. A false light, perhaps, but a light. The only light _I’ve_ ever seen. You burn with hope, with impossible hope—”

“And you, Grantaire, are like a candle snuffed out.”

Grantaire laughs to himself, softly. He sucks in on the pipe.

Around him and Enjolras, the room has gone silent, and so Marius flinches at the sudden sound of Grantaire’s chair scraping back.

“I take that as my cue to leave,” he says with a smile. He makes a flourishing bow at all of them, gives the pipe back to Joly, and shrugs on his coat. “Goodnight, mes amis.”

And Grantaire sweeps out of the room, leaving Enjolras staring hard down at the floor.


	14. Chapter 14

The night sky is stunning from so high up.

“It’s like a blanket,” Jehan says on one of their nights out together. He’s been doing remarkably well, well enough already to be in the same room as Joly and Bossuet—so well, in fact, that Grantaire can’t help but feel envy burn in his chest every time he sees his friend smile, envy so deep that it makes his tearducts prickle—he hates himself for it, but he can’t seem to make it go away—

“It’s like someone pulled a big black blanket over the sky and the stars are bits of light poking through the weave of the fabric.”

They’re flying. It’s a convenience that R has only reluctantly accepted upon its discovery the night of Jehan’s change. But it makes things easier, much easier—it allows Jehan to go out into the world, into the night. They simply step out onto the doorstep, lock the door behind them, tuck the key under the statuette of the rabbit, and fly away. No need to interact with anyone human. And, if something should happen, Grantaire is always there: larger, stronger, and more seasoned than Jehan. It’s a convenience that R wishes he’d had in those first few months.

Their wings, when they beat, push down against the air like the dips of kayak paddles on a smooth lake. It’s cold as hell up here above the mountains, damp enough that their fur can’t keep them dry, and Grantaire’s looking forward to the moment when he’ll see Jehan fold his wings—webby, skeletal, the color of rich silt—into his body and begin the dive downwards.

It happens after an hour or two. The smell of horses hits Grantaire like the sound of a trumpet and he’s startled from the half-slumber that he’s fallen into. Jehan’s small body twists. He tilts down. And they start to fall together, the air streaking past their faces so fast that it’s hard to breath.

They land on the soles of bare human feet, the shapes of wings, of talons, of long, whip-like tails drifting off them like smoke. They step into the stable together, Grantaire one hair’s breadth behind Jehan’s shoulder.

Horses make a very distinctive sound when they’re afraid: the scream of something intelligent but not quite human. Some buck in their stalls as the glinty-eyed pair step into the stable, battering hooves and noses and muscular flanks against their wooden doors. Some back away into corners and go silent. They can smell of the smell of death walking.

Neither Jehan or R make a sound. Wordlessly, they part ways and turn to their nearest stalls. Each is locked, but this is no matter. Their bodies drip down to the floor and turn slithery. They glide under the doors.

Horses, R thinks, as he’s face to face with one, are huge animals. He’s never ridden one in his life and he’s glad that he hasn’t: they could very easily and very painfully kill a man. They have no right to be as powerful as they are. Then again, he isn’t one to talk.

He ducks out of the way as hooves come crashing towards his head.

Morally, he thinks, perhaps he’s doing this poor creature a favor. Nothing this big and this strong can live out a happy life in a room this small—

But he ought to stop trying to justify his culpability. He deserves guilt: he deserves this sick blackness that constricts his chest; he deserves this cold weight in his muscles. If there is a hell, he is surely damned, and he has dragged Jehan—sweet, sparkling, wide-eyed Jehan—into the darkness with him. And that deserves more than guilt. That deserves… that deserves…

He bites and his bitterness is lost.

\---

They stagger up the hill in the darkness, clutching one another, to the graveyard that Jehan claims he can smell up close up ahead—he’s right. It’s small and overgrown, and they fumble their way inside a family mausoleum covered in prickly blackberry bushes. They collapse the moment that they’re inside and the door is shut, stretch out on the floor against the walls of the tomb with twin moans like two sleepy cats, curling in around implausibly distended stomachs. They’re far, far too heavy to fly.

In the darkness, there are cobwebs that cling to their noses and there is the smell of death: like tanned hide and wet leaves and something almost sweet, like walnuts. The four caskets along the wall are all sealed shut. They lie shoulder-to-shoulder, eyes closed, Jehan’s chin in the crook of Grantaire’s shoulder.

R splays out a hand on the angry skin of his stomach, kneading it, and lets out a long, painful belch.

“God damn all horses to hell,” he groans and hears Jehan laugh. He shifts closer to him. “Prouvaire?”

It’s not a name that Jehan hears often anymore—not from R.

“Grantaire?”

“I am glad to have you with me.”

He says this nervously, like it’s a confession, like he’s worried that Jehan will roll over and stare at him in the dark. But Jehan doesn’t. He just nuzzles Grantaire’s throat with his nose and draws closer, and the little sound he makes tells Grantaire that he’s smiling.

“And I am glad to be here,” he says.

\---

They sleep there in the mausoleum until the night rolls into day and until the day rolls back into night, and then they fly home and collapse into a tired, contented heap on their bed.

\---

Enjolras is woken by the noise of someone climbing in through his window. He hears the saucer that he sets out for the cat fall to the cobblestones outside and smash; he hears the shutters being knocked open, squealing on their hinges and banging against the walls.

“I’ll give you what I have,” Enjolras splutters, shooting upright in his bed, quilt flying off of him. “You need it more than—Courfeyrac.”

He puts a hand to his racing heart. Standing by his bedside is none other than his friend, with dark curls disheveled and one boot unlaced. In the open window behind him, out on the street peering in, is another familiar face—round spectacles, round cheeks. Combeferre.

“General Lamarque is dead,” says Courfeyrac.

Enjolras only looks at him, unsure, for a moment, what he’s hearing.

“Pardon?” he says, not moving from his bed.

“General Lamarque is dead,” Courfeyrac repeats. “He died this morning. Cholera. The cholera got him.”

“Lamarque’s a symbol of the fight for the rights of the abased,” says Combeferre, leaning in the window. He looks haggard; the part in his hair, misaligned. “And the cholera is a symbol of poverty. The epidemic affects us all.”

“And though it’s a godforsaken shame that it has to involve the gentry to interest the public—” Courfeyrac says.

“—Well, yes, of course; I didn’t mean—” protests Combeferre.

“—we can use his funeral as a rallying point to bring the people together and protest the injustices that we’re all facing under this government,” Courfeyrac finishes.

“Right,” says Combeferre.

Enjolras is out of bed by now, tugging on his trousers.

“When’s the funeral procession?” he asks.

“This afternoon.”

“Why weren’t we told sooner of his death?”

“I suppose the family wanted it keep quiet.”

“Yes. Of course. Well then, Courf, gather Les Amis. We will meet at the procession.”

Courfeyrac gives a mock salute—but it’s not as jaunty as it usually is, not by a long shot. It’s almost serious.

“Ferre,” says Enjolras, and then pauses. “Ferre, will you please pick up the saucer Courf broke? And then come with me to discuss our plans. Courf, why the devil did you climb in my window?”

“You wouldn’t answer the door,” says Courfeyrac, sheepishly. “I thought you were sleeping. And I was, indeed, right! Now, why was there a saucer on your window?”

Enjolras is buttoning his vest in the reflective metal of a pewter mug on his table.

“An offering for the fairies to keep you out,” he says, and then strides to the front door and bows Courfeyrac out before him.

He forgets the key, but it doesn't matter. He never notices because he never comes back.


	15. Chapter 15

R isn’t fully awake or aware of what he’s doing until he sees Joly’s face behind the door he’s just pulled open. Joly’s white as death, but his cheeks and ears and tip of his nose are the pinkest R’s ever seen them, and his eyes are huge, and his lips are wet and babbling.

“R—Jehan! Get Jehan up. The barricades… General Lamarque is dead and we’ve—Les Amis—they’re at the barricades, R, and you and Jehan must come now, if you are coming. We need—Enjolras has a man prisoner, and Marius’ friend is dead already, amongst others—”

Grantaire’s vision sways. He takes Joly’s shoulders. He looks at him, nearly nose to nose, feeling his breath on his face. Joly is alive. He’s still alive.

He’d known this was coming but he’d managed, until now, to convince himself that it wasn’t. Not really. Because it couldn’t be. His friends were all going to live.

“Joly,” he says.

That’s all he can say.

He can hear Jehan moving behind him, sitting up in bed. Maybe Jehan’s already heard the awful news. Maybe not. He wants to turn around and tell him to go back to sleep—maybe when they wake up for real, this won’t have started already. This night that he knew would come. Not yet.

But Jehan’s getting up, asking, quietly, where Bossuet is.

“Stay here,” Grantaire is saying. “Stay here. With us. Where it is safe. You cannot go. You must stay, Joly; we need you…”

He’s still breathing in Joly’s face, clutching his shoulders, digging his fingers in like maybe he can—like maybe he _will_ make him here with him, keep him safe.

“R,” somebody says. Jehan’s prying him away from Joly. “R, be still. Be still, mon ami.”

“No,” Grantaire says. “No, I shan’t be still—let me go!” He whips around, snarls in Jehan’s face, claws prickling at the insides of his fingertips, waiting to by unsheathed. “He will die. They will all die.”

Joly’s soft, reedy voice says, “Our cause is greater than we, R.”

“You are wrong,” R spits, spinning back to Joly. Joly takes an involuntary step backwards. “You are wrong. You go to your death—and what will it accomplish? Death accomplishes nothing. Death is nothing. _You_ are something, Joly; you are my friend. And to die for something insubstantial, for phantoms, for _ideas—”_

But Joly—small, shivery, anxious little Joly—is holding his hand up for silence, his eyes flashing, his chin held up proudly. Grantaire slows to a halt, breathing hard. His fists are clenched at his sides. He feels like every inch of his body has turned into one huge, pulsing circulatory system.

“Are you coming, or are you staying here?” Joly asks. “I must return to Juste.”

“I am coming,” says Jehan.

And it takes Grantaire a moment to respond, but he eventually croaks out, “As am I.”

\---

From four blocks away, Grantaire can smell the blood. He can taste it on his tongue, feel the longing for it tugging down in the pit of his stomach, itching in his palms. He reaches for Jehan’s hand. Jehan grips it like a buoy.

Joly’s led them a roundabout way through the streets, and now he turns and scampers up a flight of stairs to a darkened doorway, urging them on with an impatient wave of his arm. They follow him into a cold, cavernous room that stinks of rubbing alcohol and formaldehyde and death. There are cross-cuts on the walls of human figures, delicate pathways traced through their forms in black and red and blue ink. An anatomy lab. They’re in one of the university buildings.

They follow Joly out into a hallway, up another flight of stairs, through a door—they emerge on a rooftop, where the night air is sharp and cold.

Somewhere in the distance comes the crack of a gunshot. They all flinch.

Joly runs now.

The spaces between the rooftops are minimal in this part of the city. Most blocks are full of buildings pressed so tightly together that their rooves form lazy staircases. The alleyways present greater challenges. Too short a leap—and the leaps are long—and a man could break his neck. Frankly, Grantaire is surprised that Joly made it here without doing so. But now he and Jehan are here to help, and they take Joly by either arm over every alleyway, making the jumps as easily as if they were playing hopscotch.

They end up on the roof of the Corinth. The smell of blood now is so thick that Jehan lets Joly go and backs away from him, grabbing onto R’s shoulder and covering his hand with his mouth. R himself can feel his resolve trembling. He can hear the pulse running quick in Joly’s throat.

“Go down,” he says to him. “Go down and ensure that…”

He doesn’t finish his sentence, but Joly nods, lifting his hand to clap Grantaire’s shoulder—but he thinks the better of it, takes a step back, and gives them both a long look. Then he steps forward, sits down on the edge of the roof, turns, and begins his ginger climb down the façade of the Corinth.

He is met with relieved murmurings at the bottom.

“Juste.” Joly’s voice cracks. “Is everyone—”

“Yes,” says Bossuet’s voice, and both Grantaire and Jehan inhale relief. They grip onto one another up there on the roof, little more than willpower and sharp teeth and thudding heartbeats. “Where are—?”

“On their way,” says Joly. “They were held up by…” His lie falters.

“By what? Where are they?” The voice is not Bossuet’s but another: deeper, colder, sharper. Enjolras.

Grantaire’s hand slips on Jehan’s arm, then grips tighter.

“You cannot go down,” Jehan hisses in his ear. “You cannot leave me. I am breaking. And I can feel you—you smell of hunger and of too much excitement. And of fur. And—”

“Quiet,” says Grantaire.

“…I believe that Grantaire is looking to procure more weapons,” Joly is saying, down on the ground. “You know that he has his connections.”

“You oughtn’t have left them,” Enjolras spits. His voice rings in the night air, too loud, too bright. “They may not know the way back. They may be caught before they reach the barricade. You may have just signed the execution papers of two of our most core members. And for what? To return more quickly to Lesgle? You ought to have brought them back with you. Was that not the purpose of your—”

“How dare you speak to Camille like that, Enjolras.”

The faces on the ground turn upwards. There’s Grantaire, on the roof of the Corinthe.

From this angle, he can see the barricade: a massive structure of broken furniture piled up together as if some strange drain had opened up in the sky and poured it all through into the street. Grantaire’s seen a dead whale once, has seen it on the single journey that he’s taken to the seaside, and the barricade almost reminds him of that—something so unfathomably huge and domineering and dangerous laid down on its side, motionless. Beyond it is the empty street. Silent. Dark. Waiting for morning to come again. Somehow, Grantaire thinks it’d be less ominous if the National Guard were standing plainly there, poised at the ready to shoot.

The smell of human blood is all-pervasive here. It slips in his nose and wraps its tendrils around all of his insides and tugs. It’s worse, even worse, now that he can see the sources lined up neatly against the wall, heads lolling, toes pointing up towards the sky. Six of them so far. Six bodies already at this barricade alone.

“Grantaire,” says Enjolras, and this shakes him from his thoughts. Enjolras’ voice is strained, but his face is as even as ever. “Get down here immediately. You’ll be shot.”

Grantaire spreads his arms toward the empty street, grinning, if only for the tiny frown that appears between Enjolras’ eyebrows. He takes a lengthy, well-flourished bow.

“I come with no further weapons, dear leader, but my own fists and a hearty sense of disapproval for all of your actions tonight. Am I still invited to your revolution?”

Enjolras splutters. Grantaire can’t help but laugh to himself.

“Get _down_ here.”

Jehan is whispering something behind him, but Grantaire isn’t listening. He’s obeying Enjolras. He’s beginning his climb downwards as if in a dream.

And when he gets to the bottom, Joly is there to help him down. Grantaire wouldn’t admit it aloud, but he’s glad for Joly’s hands on his waist, on his shoulders. They feel like small anchors keeping his skin together, like tethers keeping his heart from leaping through his throat towards the glowing lighthouses that are the pools of blood on the cobblestones. He wants to fall to his knees and lap them up. He wants to cry. He leans into Joly’s touch, grabs for his elbow, fixes a twitchy grin on his face. He wonders if the others can see him shaking.

“Where is Prouvaire?”

Enjolras voice cuts through the nape of Grantaire’s neck.

There, in the darkness, Enjolras is something ethereal. Something huge and bright and implosive. Something humbling and terrible and hushed. His shoulders are thrown back, his hair draped over them almost silvery in the moonlight, his thick lips drawn and cold, throat stretched bare, Adam’s apple taught under the white skin, veins standing out against the muscles. Enjolras is fragile; Enjolras is made of flesh and Grantaire has teeth.

Grantaire swallows his insides back down. He smiles.

“Why do you ask?” He’s goading him as much as he’s stalling for time.

“He was—” Enjolras shakes his head. “Joly, where is Prouvaire?”

“On his way,” Joly answers, digging one warning fingertip into Grantaire’s shoulder.

Enjolras looks between them for a moment. The corners of his eyes are tight. Then, finally, he lets out a huff of air through his nose that might be a laugh if Grantaire didn’t know any better. He turns on his heel.

Behind Enjolras’ retreating back, Combeferre gives Grantaire a long, careful look. It’s penetrating, that look. A warning.

“Courfeyrac,” Enjolras barks, “take the watch. The rest of you, at ease. We will need our rest tomorrow.”


	16. Chapter 16

Sometime later, there is a clatter of movement from the top of the Corinth.

Grantaire has been curled up, nose to knees, a few feet from Joly and Bossuet, watching the moonlight skating off the wet patches on the cobblestone. He’s been breathing, trembling, listening to Bossuet fall in and out of fits of snoring. Enjolras is propped up against the barricade on a bench beside Courfeyrac, his chin on his chest, his heartbeat running slow and the sharp, sweet, heady, almost chemical scent of him washing across the street—but then, the clatter.

There is Jehan’s lanky shadow climbing down from the roof.

Grantaire shoots to his feet, the muscles in his arms twitching, reading to arrest Jehan and haul him back up to the roof if need be. As it turns out, fortunately, his vigilance is unnecessary. Another eye, weaker than Grantaire’s, might see Jehan’s movements filling nothing more than smoke-like grace, but Grantaire detects something else: a looseness, a slight stumble as Jehan drops the last few feet to the cobblestones, a twisting in his ankles. There’s something heavy and black and rectangular dangling from his hand. It clinks metallically with the jump.

Grantaire catches Jehan’s arm, as though the taller man is a young boy and Grantaire, a teacher about to scold him. Jehan’s eyes, when he turns to face him, reflect flat, green circles off the faint light spilling from the connecting boulevard and his breath is… wrong. Thin. Hard and spiny. It makes Grantaire’s head reel.

“What are you doing down here?” he gets out, blinking at the smell, bewildered. His hand never leaves Jehan’s arm, though; he’s thinking of the others behind him, thinking of the shine coming off Jehan’s eyes. Grantaire glances behind himself to where Courfeyrac is leaning against the barricade, still on watch.

Courf waves. Grantaire gives a curt nod. Jehan gives a small, flourished bow.

“ _Prouvaire_.”

“Hush, hush,” Jehan breathes, too low for mortal ears. “I hab stuffed by doze up wid cotton soaked id ether.”

Grantaire stops.

“You have… done what?”

“By doze.” Jehan points to his face. His smile has turned almost feral. “I hab stuffed it wid cotton soaked id ether. I caddot spell a thigg.”

This doesn’t do much to loosen Grantaire’s grip. In fact, he strengthens it and turns immediately on his heel, dragging Jehan with him. He waves Courf—who has begun to get up, sensing that something is wrong—brusquely away.

“Come,” he says. “Now. Inside. We must get that out. Is it painful? It is, surely. What have you here? What is this case?”

“Joly’s bedicid bag.”

Grantaire swears. He tugs open the door of the Corinth, pushing Jehan inside ahead of him.

“You sneaky thief,” he says, gruffly. “We will share your spoils. But, first, get that out.” He shuts the door, moves to Jehan’s face with his hands raised; Jehan bats him away. “Ether in the nose… Have you begun to bleed? What was it that you were thinking?”

“Dough, dough; dough bleedigg.”

Jehan inspects a tuft of cotton that he’s produced from his left nostril.

“Well, baybe a bit.”

“Get it out. Let me help—”

“Get off, R.”

“Have you never been given ether before? How can you not know that it burns to inhale, let alone—? I suppose your nose was anesthetized before it had the chance—”

“Stop touchigg id. Get off—no, I hab’t had surgery before.”

“Neither have I. Joly would give me some to take when I’d—stop _moving—_ for the ill effects of forgoing wine for—Jehan, it’s got to come out.”

“Let be do it, let _be_ ; it’s _by_ doze!”

They are squabbling over Jehan’s nose, blood and bits of flesh and wet wads of cotton splattering all over the floorboards, when a voice says, “Fine soldiers you two are.”

They freeze.

“Indeed, France’s finest. Idle, spoiled schoolboys who have fallen out of repute with their own fathers for their vices, and who now feel entitled to seek to procure their allowances elsewhere. To draw it from the hands of the very class of noble peoples to which they owe their current security, and to squander it in the same ways in which they’ve squandered the privileges afforded to them by their fathers.”

The voice—deep and clear and unwavering—comes from the corner, where a man sits against the wall. Even in the shadows of the building, unlit, cloaked in complete darkness, he is clear to their eyes: strong-jawed, hard-eyed, and stocky. They ought to have seen him before; they would have, had they not been occupied.

Grantaire takes a stride towards him as Jehan furrows his brow, still pressing Grantaire’s handkerchief to his nose.

“I pray: say that again, sir,” Grantaire says. His voice is soft, and his smile bites through his words.

The man spits to his left.

“You heard me,” he says. “You are lazy and ungrateful. You are traitors to your nation, and the National Guard will hang all of you for your crimes against France.”

“Why do you not stand up and face us schoolboys like a man, then, sir? What has you frightened so that you are cowed in the corner there?”

“Your friends,” says the man, “have bound my hands and feet.”

He gestures with his chin behind him where, indeed, there is a column running from floor to ceiling on which he appears to be affixed.

“It took six of them to tie me,” he says. “You ought to be glad of your missed opportunity.”

“Perhaps they shall allow me to be the one to shoot you.”

“If they were going to shoot me, they would have done it already,” says the man. “No, they plan to hold me as a bargaining chip. But the Guard will be here again in the morning, and then things will be over rather too quickly for any deals to be made or hostages to be exchanged. You have—what?—twenty men?”

Grantaire’s chest rumbles. His lips curl back.

“ _You_ —! How dare you. How dare you. You know nothing. You know nothing of my friends; nothing of their courage, of their determination, of their hearts—”

“Their courage, as you say, or their foolishness, as I say, shall be their downfall.”

“You know _nothing_ of my friends,” Grantaire repeats. He can feel spittle on his lips. “And you know nothing of the people of France, for if you did, you should know that they live in hatred for the government, for men like you, who—”

“The people are not coming! Look around you. The fighting has been on all afternoon, and yet you remain alone. No, the people sleep. They have chosen their beds over your barricades. And in the morning, they shall choose their breakfasts over your hearses. You are alone. You are outnumbered. And you shall all be dead by—”

The man’s head snaps back.

By the time that Grantaire can blink, blood is flowing freely down the man’s face, the man’s head is lolling, and Jehan is standing there, rubbing his knuckles.

Grantaire makes a thin, squeaky sound like a cat being picked up without warning.

“Oh, don’t tell me he wasn’t asking for it,” says Jehan. His voice is strained, whether with the toll the ether has taken on his throat, or with emotion.

“I—certainly not.”

“Excellent.” Jehan is coming briskly back across the room, heels clicking on the familiar hardwood floor, echoing. The Corinth has been gutted of all of its usual occupants: chair, tables, and men all having been dragged out onto the street. Its walls stretch like empty ribs.

Jehan picks up Joly’s bag from where he has left it. Wordlessly, he makes his way to the ladder that leads upstairs. And Grantaire follows him.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> you know what i realized a few chapters back, but was too late in realizing to correct? the syringe wasn't invented until the 1840s, and wasn't modernized until like 1850-something. 
> 
> oh well. guess if we have vampires, we can have syringes.

The sound of the locks on Joly’s case being snapped open feels to Grantaire as he imagines church bells might feel to a nun. He hasn’t had this feeling in some time—the scraping impatience in his jaw, the curls of heat in his chest, the annoyance that thrums through every muscle—and he hasn’t missed it a bit, but that doesn’t mean he’d set himself above ignoring its impulse. It’s different than wanting blood, this feeling, and it’s worse in its own way because it lacks the physicality and the mindlessness of hunger. This is a conscious and boiling necessity to destroy the present, or at least to cut oneself out of it.

He can hear, as the faint crackling of a fire would be to human ears, the soft breaths of his friends as they sleep out there on the street. He can hear Courfeyrac’s heart beating just a bit faster than all of the rest. He can hear the particular skipping between each beat of Joly’s.

This is why Grantaire refuses to look up from his hands as the case is opened until he can make himself say to Jehan, “We must stay awake.”

“We have cocaine,” says Jehan.

This is good enough for Grantaire.

“What else?”

“Morphine. Laudanum. The ether. And the cocaine. I should like to try the cocaine first.”

“Certainly. Give me the morphine.”

Jehan eyes the hand that’s been extended his way.

“You are trembling.”

“My nerves are shaken.”

“By the man downstairs? He is no one. As you said, he knows nothing of us.”

“No, not by him—or, only somewhat by him. By all of this. By everyone. The Corinth is in shambles. The street down there is in shambles. France is in shambles; the world is in shambles. Our party of old amis is in shambles. We may soon be gone. We _will_ soon be gone. Everything goes. What will a revolution do but speed things along? The Illyrians revolted, and were as brave as we, if not more so, and still the Romans slaughtered them and took them as slaves. The Illyrians might have waited out the Roman invasion, carved out a few more years for themselves, and what did they do? They hastened the process. They greased up the gears, and the machine sped on and crushed them under its weight as it always inevitably shall, for all of us. And here we are, hastening the process.”

Jehan is watching him speak, or rather, letting him speak, the fire in Jehan’s eyes, the curl of his mouth, growing every moment. This is why Grantaire pauses for breath, a half-question on his face; he cannot bear to see Jehan— _his_ Jehan—look at him with such fury.

Grantaire waits for a moment, something sharp in his throat as he watches the muscles in Jehan’s jaw work, before he says, “Say something.”

A series of sounds, beginnings of words he can’t say, come out of Jehan’s mouth. He settles, eventually, on, “Your irreverence is a mask for cowardice, Grantaire.”

The man in question laughs. His waterlines prickle.

“Yes,” he says. “I suppose it is. But what would you have me do?”

“Go _out_ there!” Jehan’s voice is raised now. His eyes, his teeth glint in the lightless room. “If you feel so strongly that your friends should… should… Speak to them! Prevent them from fighting. Guide them back the way that Joly took us. Spread out your wings and _carry_ them away, for heaven’s sake. Do not simply sit in here and… You speak with conviction, but you show none whatsoever. I have never once seen you seize agency. You act as though actions are purposeless, as though anything that any man does will have no effect on the world. And I tell you that you are wrong. You could stop this revolution within a quarter of an hour if you wished, and yet all you do is sit here and bask in the shadows of you own misery—”

“I cannot! I cannot. I cannot, as you say, simply spread my wings and carry them away—they are men. They are my friends. Not children; not my puppets—”

“And it is certainly lucky that you possess such high morals,” Jehan snaps, “because I myself do believe in their cause and in their fight and in their abilities, and if you were to try to stop them, I should be inclined to stop _you_.”

“I… I cannot understand your anger with me if this is the case. I have no intentions of inference. I would never—”

“You would never, because you do not _care_. You mock them. You belittle their efforts. You dress them in contemptuous terms of false glory and laugh. You are no better than that man downstairs. You are, in fact, on his side. And you are wrong. You… you are…” Jehan has risen to his feet somewhere in the midst of this, his long fingers curling and uncurling at his sides. His nostrils are bleeding freely again, and he licks the blood from his upper lip with an impatient tongue, sucking in a breath through his nose. “I am going downstairs now. Out to the street. With our friends.”

“Mon coeur, please. Please sit with me. The ether is confusing your sources of indignation. And I have perhaps said some things not to your taste—Jehan!” Jehan has made movements towards the door. “Jehan, my most intimate friend, surely you must understand my—”

“Goodnight, R.”

And, not without a little tip of his yellow hat, Jehan turns and heads back down the stairs.

Grantaire doesn’t make any moves after him. He just sits and watches the spot where Jean Prouvaire’s back has disappeared, hearing his footsteps, hearing the door to the wineshop open and close, hearing the silence that follows, a silence that seems to have descended before he could even blink. He stares at the doorway. He feels vague. Half-conscious. His brain runs through the beginnings of thoughts, cuts them off short—what has just..? Jehan has gone.

_Coward. Coward. Irreverent coward. Wallowing in your own misery. Convictionless, unfaithful. Faithless. Faithless, unfaithful, self-pitying coward._

The world is sparkling around the edges by the time that Grantaire remembers that he needs to breathe. He forces air in through his nose, his tight throat, lets it out in a little laugh.

Jehan is right. He is absolutely right. Grantaire is worth nothing to this revolution, to the people he’s considered his friends. He has no place here. He won’t stop them. He won’t support them. He is a cold, inconsequential planet in the orbit of their—in the orbit of Enjolras’ sun.

He can be honest with himself now. That is why he is here. For Enjolras. To admire him. To circle around him. Like a gnat circling a candle. Like a meteor about to crash. And when Enjolras goes…

When Joly and Bossuet and Jehan go…

But, no, no, they don’t care for him. And rightly so. And it is wrong for him to care so much for them, to show his unwanted affection. He is related tangentially, imposing on their lives, colliding with them in the pursuit of someone bright, someone alive, someone beautiful. A worthless journey when he, Grantaire, is worthless. A convictionless, unfaithful, immoral, self-serving, self-pitying—

Self-pitying, indeed. He laughs again at himself, finally moving from his stiffened position, feeling like a taxidermy animal come back to life. He buries his head in his hands and giggles helplessly—and, as he does, he feels something cold and smooth in his palm.

He remembers what it is in the darkness behind his fingers: it’s the vial of morphine that Jehan passed to him. He says a silent prayer of gratitude to whatever gods might be listening, looks down at Joly’s battered leather bag, still sitting on the table. This, at least, he has.

He can repay Joly in the morning, he thinks, as his shaky fingers pry a syringe from its stiff felt pocket in the bag’s wall. He can repay Joly in the morning, if Joly is, indeed, still alive in the morning. If Grantaire himself is still alive in the morning. Perhaps the National Guard will storm up here, too, and put a bullet into his head. Perhaps he will be asleep when it happens. Or perhaps he will fall into such a deep sleep that he never wakes—this would be ideal. This would be ideal. His friends will not live to see the morning. Or, rather, the people he love will not live to see the morning. They will not, he thinks, as he slips the needle through the cap of the vial and draws the cloudy liquid up—as much as can fit—as if in a dream. They will die. He _has_ conviction; he believes in this. They will die. And he shall die, too, if he can manage it. If his body won’t prevent him, won’t hold him too tightly. There is nothing more here for him but this—the cold slide of the needle against, against, and then _into_ his vein—the sudden awareness of his pulse, the shudder-inducing sensation of the comparatively icy liquid meeting with his blood—borrowed blood, borrowed blood—the numbness that courses through his fingers, disconcerting but welcome—his breath going faster—

He draws the needle out and, before he can convince himself otherwise, pushes it into the vial again, draws more liquid in. There isn’t enough left in to fill the body of the syringe again. He draws up bubbles. He makes no effort to dispose of them before finding a different vein, sliding the needle in, pushing down the plunger.

 _It will be alright now,_ he think to himself as he pulls the syringe back out, his eyes on the doorway again. He tosses the syringe to the table, hears the glass body shatter. He breathes. In and out. It will be alright now.

It will be alright now. The Corinth is quiet.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ~*~MAJJJJORRRR WARNIGS FOR GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE AND CHARACTER DEATH.~*~  
> this is the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad chapter that you're all gonna hate me for; im so sorry friends  
> (but just know that i hate sad endings and could not bear to give this fic one)

The sound of drums.

Enjolras awakes standing on the top of the barricade, looking down on the empty street below. He doesn’t remember standing up, walking to the top. It seems that maybe he’s been awake all night, and that his mind has only just caught up with his body.

The street is empty, yes, but they are coming. When he looks back over his shoulder at his friends, only one looks back from amongst the piles of sleeping bodies curled together. A pair of wide, sad eyes: Prouvaire.

Something passes between them.

Prouvaire nudges Courfeyrac, who is wedged into his chest tight as a cat trying to take his breath.

“Wake, mon ami,” he whispers, and Courf groans, stirs. His legs stretch out and the toes of his boots knead into Combeferre’s leg. Combeferre’s arm pulls up with a start and knocks Feuilly in the jaw.

“Mm,” says Bahorel.

“Drums,” says Joly, quietly, starting up.

Enjolras is leaping from his perch, making his way down to the bottom of the barricade, to the top of the battered piano on which he has stowed his pistol. His flurry of movement, however silent, sends the others into an organized brand of panic. They grab the weapons they’ve slept beside. Clicks of guns being cocked. The scrape of metal on metal as Courfeyrac draws an elegant little sword from his cane.

(“Take this,” he says, pressing an old cavalry musket into Marius’ hands, refusing his protests.)

Bossuet fits his hand into Joly’s and lets out a breath. With almost uncanny silence, Enjolras has ascended again, tucking his head under the wing of a settee. Only his eyes are high enough to see into the street beyond, the rising sun is glinting off his hair. He’ll be seen immediately. But before Joly can whisper this to him, the clatter of hooves begins to distinguish itself over the beating of the drums and then, almost at once, the clicking of worn boot heels on the cobblestones.

They are coming.

A knife of air through a missing front tooth; Bahorel curls his fist around a stash of bullets in his pocket, glancing behind him at Feuilly. Feuilly’s freckled cheeks, usually dark and hardy, have gone almost sallow.

The footsteps out on the street come to a halt, replaced by the sound of cannons groaning on their hinges and the clatter of their butts to the stone.

“Mon vieux,” Feuilly says.

“Mon chèr,” says Bahorel.

“Boys,” call a voice from the other side of the barricade, hardly audible, “we have given you ample time to surrender. We are gentlemen of the law, and we fight fairly in the light of day. The sun is rising. Come out now and we might still correct this. Your co-conspirators have all fallen or been captured and await execution. You are alone. But perhaps if you give yourselves up, you may still plead for your lives. Some of you are clearly well-educated, of a higher class than the—”

Enjolras fires. He hits his mark.

\---

Cannon-fire is a horrific thing to behold. A cannonball is twice the size of a billiard ball, and much heavier. Consider a billiard ball being thrown like a shotput at a human face. Now consider a cannonball being propelled in accuracy at its target by gunpowder.

Bossuet is the first to die. He is, for the first time in his life, lucky in that it is quick. A cannonball crashes straight through the legs of a pile of chairs and hits him squarely in the face, collapsing all recognizably human features into a mess of blood and cartilage and splintered bone, sending him staggering backwards to the ground where he stays, unmoving.

Joly doesn’t make a sound. He stands there, looking at Bossuet, while the pool of blood grows.

Any moment now, Juste will get up. Any moment now, he will peel back the horrible mask he’s put over his face and say, “Boo!” and they will laugh together.

 Over in the doorframe of the Corinthe, where he has been forced to retreat in gutting terror of the rising sun, Jehan Prouvaire’s lungs turn to lead. He very nearly leaps out and seizes what’s left of Bossuet, shakes him by the shoulders, kisses him, holds him, protects him somehow. _Somehow_ , he must. Because Bossuet won’t die—Bossuet will never die—Bossuet is a fixture, a cleat on the dock. What stops Jehan is the sizzling that begins on the back of his hand the moment he thoughtlessly puts it out into the light, intending to move—it’s as though his pores have been opened up by some unknown chemical, pin-head holes stretching out in his skin, blood surfacing through them and boiling in the sunlight, evaporating. He yelps, draws back, sucks at the wound.

And then he stands there, trembling, and watches as Joly slowly defrosts. He watches as Joly, expressionless, heedless of the battle going on around him, takes the three steps to Bossuet’s body and kneels beside it. He watches as Joly picks up Bossuet’s limp wrist and feels it for a pulse that isn’t there.

Jehan bites back the urge to call out for him. But this is a private moment. Something that shouldn’t be broken. So, alone, Joly makes a slow examination of Bossuet’s wounds. He tries to wipe the blood and shattered bone and bits of grey matter away with his shirtsleeve. He strokes what’s left of Bossuet’s hair. He kisses his ear—or maybe he whispers something to him. He lays his head down on his still chest and looks up into his ruined face for a long while.

And then Joly gets up, eyes and nose streaming freely, saliva stringing between his lips as he shudders—he nods to himself, or to Bossuet, and then he climbs the barricade to crouch beside Enjolras and take aim.

The sunlight has Jehan trapped, digging his nails into his palms. He watches.

He watches as, moments later, Bahorel’s body topples from the barricade, breaking, limp, on the stones. He watches as a child—a _child_ ; what is a child doing here? in this Hell?—is gunned down, and he watches as Marius carries the small body down and lays it beside the body of a bony woman, Marius’ pretty lips gaping, his big eyes round and glassy and horrified. Jehan watches as Marius himself struck in the chest with another cannonball—he hears his clavicles break. He watches as a bullet goes clean through Feuilly’s skull, blood spattering the brick façade of the Corinthe. He watches as Combeferre crumples beside Enjolras, his fingers, in death, clutching at his friend’s shirt sleeve.

He watches Enjolras’ countenance shift to something—to _pain_ , to pain beyond comprehension as he pulls Combeferre’s stiff fingers away.

He watches Enjolras climb down the barricade.

Courfeyrac is keeled over the piano bench, vomiting. His forearm holds a bullet and he’s paler than milk. Marius is sat beside him, a hand on Courfeyrac’s back, his blue eyes huge and far-away. He is stripped down to his undershirt, which clings tight to his body, wet with his blood. Joly looks relatively unharmed, but has Bossuet’s carnage smeared liberally across his face from where he’s been wiping his nose on his sleeve.

A hot, sickening, and almost dreamlike wave of shame rises over Jehan as Enjolras’ eyes catch him there, hiding in the doorway, but Enjolras merely gives him a nod and looks away.

“Amis,” Enjolras says.

Courfeyrac looks up, wipes his mouth.

“Enj,” he says. And somehow, he still manages a small smile.

“We swore not to surrender.” It is the first time Jehan has ever heard Enjolras’ voice crack.

“And we shan’t,” says Marius, tapping a finger on the gun in his lap, although Jehan knows that there is no possible way for Marius to lift it when his collarbones have been so smashed to bits.

“No,” Joly agrees. “We shan’t.”

He has Bossuet’s pistol in his fingers. Courfeyrac gives him a nod.

Enjolras looks around at their diminished group.

“Alright,” he says. “Alright, then. The barricade shall fall any moment; I watched their cannons preparing another round of fire. Joly, Courfeyrac, Marius: you take the right wing. Defend the alley, the bodies. Jehan and I shall—”

The cannons roar.


	19. Chapter 19

Grantaire wakes in silence. No shouting, no gunfire, only the wind whistling through a hole in the wall where a stray bullet pierced the boards. A ray of smoky sunlight spills in through that hole. Grantaire’s brain feels as though it’s been set out to dry like a raisin.

Before he can register the meaning of this silence, before he can even piece together the events of the night before, there is a clatter, and then voices coming from downstairs.

“He is the leader!”

“It was he who slew the artillery-man!”

“It is well that he has placed himself there. Let him remain there. Let us shoot him down on the spot.”

A thud—metal falling to wood. Two footsteps of boots worn through to the cheap metal in the innards of their heels. And then:

“So shoot me.”

It is a voice that Grantaire would recognize anywhere: a voice he’s heard a thousand times on Wednesday nights, a thousand more in his dreams, but precious few in the light of day. It is Enjolras. Enjolras telling someone to—

The Guard. The barricade. The revolution. Enjolras, alone, downstairs, his heart beating in the silence—

The cocking of a gun.

“I feel as though I am about to shoot a flower.”

There is very little that Grantaire remembers after that moment, in the aftermath. There is the scrape of the bannister on the stairs as it cuts open his arm in his flight. There is the sound of a uniformed man giving a yelp, and the sight of his huge, glistening eyes as he turns. The click of a gun, a _BANG_ , an explosion in Grantaire’s left shoulder. And then there is the warmth in his jaws of the throat of the man who’s just shot him, the puncturing of his teeth through the thick, slippery skin of an artery. And then there is blood. Blood and the beating of giant, skeletal wings.

More guns go off, but they are like the stings of wasps to this creature who lives inside of Grantaire’s body and outside of his mind. They are like puppies nipping at his ankles. He bats them down and shatters them like bottles on the floor, their blood like thick, hot, red wine. He laps into them with a rasping tongue. He claws their backs, rips their uniforms. He moans as often as he snarls.

It takes minutes for Grantaire to return to himself. When he does, he is licking blood off the floorboards, wood polish and dust. His heart is beating so fast that it may as well be shuddering. He is conscious of the fact that, despite an enormous reluctance to stop himself, he has drunk too much to take a proper breath, his lungs crushed against his swollen belly.

He slurps up another mouthful—and then, perhaps, another—before he forces himself to sit up. He is dizzy, elated, flushed. There is gore slathered over his waistcoat and his shirt sleeves, buttons either popped or straining, chin and mouth red and sticky, hair mussed and wet.

Enjolras is standing, still as stone, behind the billiard table.

They look at one another: awe, disgust, relief, chagrin.

“Vive la Republique,” says Grantaire, weakly.

\---

It’s then, in the absence of the National Guard, in the absence of sound, that a faint stirring can be heard: the scrape of wet, ragged lungs pulling in air. Enjolras seems not to have noticed—whether it is due to shellshock or his inferior hearing, Grantaire doesn’t know—but Grantaire is up and across the floorboards in a moment. The doorway is like the entrance to a furnace. He squints into it. There’s a figure there on the cobblestones, lying supine as a beetle on its back, choking. The air is full of a smell that Grantaire can only compare to a Portobello mushroom being grilled.

He recognizes the figure. He wants to spit back the air he’s breathed in: the smoke of his friend burning.

“Jehan?” he whispers.

Jehan doesn’t reply. He’s like an oyster whose shell has been cracked, lying submissive to the sun.

“ _Enjolras,_ ” says Grantaire, without taking his eyes from the scene playing out through the doorway. “Enjolras. Please—”

He glances behind him at the man in red, who is stone-faced, wild-eyed. Their eyes catch one another. Enjolras comes forward: one step, two, and then he’s walking.

“What is—?” He sees Jehan. He almost stops, but he doesn’t: he walks out through the doorway, into the light of the sun, and kneels down. There’s no moment of hesitation then, no pause when he sees Jehan’s body, flayed and boiling, to wrinkle his nose. Enjolras picks up the poet, Prouvaire, and carries him inside into the safety of the shadows inside the Corinth.

It is so, so quiet outside of those rasping breaths. Grantaire isn’t even mindful of the brush of Enjolras’ hands on his as he steps up closer and moves to take Jehan. His flesh is soft, like rotting wood, in Grantaire’s arms. His cheeks are grey and have holes gaping in them like—he doesn’t want to think about it. He leans forward and whispers in his ear, tracks the faint traces of Jehan’s nod.

It’s a relief when the teeth prick his neck. He sinks against the wall, shuts his eyes. Jehan sucks.

Grantaire meditates, for a moment, on the sensation of it. His heart working to pump the blood up into this vein that Jehan has chosen, the vein closing, opening, like a straw with a clog in the end, the warmth in his belly spreading out through his chest and, subsequently, into the vein, the softness of Jehan’s lips, the pull of his throat, the pounding of his heart, which Grantaire is now filling—but he can only think all of this for a moment before he is, inevitably, lost in the glorious feeling of it all. Like gold. Like the first breath of cold air after being submerged underwater. At one point, his eyes flicker open and he sees Enjolras’—he has to close them again before he starts to cry.

Jehan pulls away when he has recovered the strength to do so, his cheek falling against Grantaire’s shoulder with a gasp. And when Grantaire can lift his arm, he runs his fingers through Jehan’s pretty hair.

Enjolras is sitting on the floor, cross-legged, facing them. For once in his life, he is silent.

Grantaire looks at him, unsure of whether to fall on his knees and praise whatever gods might be listening for Enjolras’ deliverance, or to kill Enjolras himself.

“They are all gone,” Grantaire says.

Enjolras nods.

Jehan lifts his head. His lips are bloody, his eyes unfocused; but his skin is pink and whole, now, at very least.

“Bring them in,” he says, hoarsely.

The other two turn to him.

“Pardon?” says Grantaire.

“Bring them in,” Jehan repeats. “Enjolras, bring them in. We shall give them blood.”

Enjolras nearly springs to his feet—but he controls himself. He squats. His hands are fists, shaking. His knees kiss the floor, come up again.

“You can do that?”

Jehan nods at the same time that Grantaire says, “No.”

“No?” Enjolras says. He looks to Jehan.

“Yes,” says Jehan, at the same times as Grantaire says, “They will be changed.”

Enjolras looks between them.

“Can you do it, or not?”

“You saw me,” Grantaire says, cutting off the beginning of whatever Jehan was about to say. “You saw what I am. You see what _we_ are.”

“Yes.”

“They would be as we are. Inhuman. Between life and death.”

“I should prefer them closer to life than fully dead.”

“Yes, as would I, but it oughtn’t to be our _decision!”_ cries Grantaire. “It ought to be their own.”

“And yet they are not here to make it,” says Jehan.

“But who are we to decide for them?”

“Their friends,” says Enjolras, flatly.

His eyes are like struck flint, and Grantaire’s fingers, where they were clutching Jehan’s arm, go loose. When Enjolras gets to his feet, his shadow spreads over the two of them. He smells like blood and smoke and sunlight—like things too dangerous for Grantaire to touch.

And Grantaire says, after a moment, “I concede.”

Enjolras only nods before he turns on his heel and walks through the Corinth’s door, into the day, onto the street.


	20. Chapter 20

All Grantaire can think is that it sounds like a joke without a punchline.

_What do you call eight hungry newborn vampires in a wineshop an hour after a failed revolution?_

_Fucked,_ is the only answer he can think of.

He sent Enjolras out onto the street moment he could, pushing him out the door despite his protests. It felt good, bossing him around for once. It felt good, being the one who knew what he was doing for once. For a while, Enjolras hovered around on the cobblestones just past the doorstep. He watched as Grantaire sunk his teeth into his wrist. He watched as Grantaire crouched, as he brought his open veins to Bossuet’s collapsed mouth. His eyes burned on Grantaire’s neck as Bossuet’s lips—dead, alive, _undead_ —began to move against him, and then as Bossuet’s face began to reconstruct itself, fast as the images in a flipbook blurring together to make one continuous burst of motion. He watched as his friend, previously dead, picked himself up off the floor, good as new.

But he had to step back when Bossuet—good old eagle, Lesgle, who had courted Joly with fresh-picked flowers and who had given his last sous to buy Marius dinner the first time he’d met him—turned like a hound tried to lunge for his throat. He would have gotten it, too, had Grantaire not caught him by the nape of his neck with his teeth and flung him back to the floor—had Jehan not held him down to keep him out of the sunlight and off of Enjolras.

And now there are eight of them. Eight of them, all out of their minds with hunger, and Jehan and Grantaire not faring much better, having given all the blood in their veins to their new brood. There’s not enough in the four Guardsmen who were part of the firing squad—not enough, at least, for ten. For eight so recently born, eight so hungry. The uniforms are torn to ribbons within an hour. Within an hour, there is nothing left but bones and dry, dry flesh. The corpses are cicada husks.

Combeferre’s eyes are glittering painfully, huge in his head, as he sits on the dark side of the threshold. He’s squeezing his nails into his palms, trying to speak.

“Enjolras,” he whimpers.

“Mon ami.” Enjolras’ heart feels like something submerged in stagnant water for too long. He wants to vomit.

“Enjolras, please... what happened after…?”

“Don’t think on it now,” says Enjolras. “You are safe. You are alive.”

“I… I am so…”

“So hungry,” sighs Courfeyrac, collapsing beside him. He noses Combeferre’s neck, frowns, and lets out a groan. He puts his head in his hands. “So hungry.”

A wail shivers through Combeferre’s chest. Courfeyrac takes it up. And soon the others, behind them, are howling like a chorus of dogs, like so many musical saws. Prouvaire and Grantaire try to quiet them, to little avail. Let all of Paris hear. Let them think that they are mourners for those who have passed.

It is horrible. Enjolras turns away and lets his steps lead him down the alleyway, trying to focus on his own breath in his ears, and not the sounds of his friends rising painfully from early graves. He sinks down against the wall, far down the alley where no blood has spilt, and stays there, trying not to think, until—

“Enjolras.”

Prouvaire’s voice. Enjolras gets up, reluctantly. His brain feels as though it might as well be cotton packed inside his skull.

“Yes.”

“Where is Marius?”

“What?”

“Where is Marius? He isn’t among our party in here. Neither Grantaire nor I have seen him since the battle.”

“He was shot,” says Enjolras, dumbly.

“In the clavicle, yes. But again?”

“I… don’t know.”

“Is—” Prouvaire grimaces. “Is his body out there?”

“No.”

“You’re certain?”

Enjolras hesitates a moment. He looks around. He tries to think.

“Yes,” he says.

It’s good to see a smile, even one as tired as the one that Prouvaire gives.

“He got away,” Prouvaire says. “There are two of you.”

Enjolas tries to force his face into some kind of smile—at least, a simulacrum of one. He feels he’s failing. The pitying look that Prouvaire gives him confirms it.

“Take heart, mon coeur,” he says. “We have been true to our cause. And we will see better days.”

Enjolras says nothing.

“Enjolras?”

“Mm.”

“You can do immediate good for us, if you are not too frightened.”

“Anything.”

“Change your clothes, tie back your hair: make yourself unrecognizable. Then go to the marketplace. We need livestock if we are to leave this place safely when night comes.”

\---

The shadows are too dark that day. Shaking knees. Cold bodies. Whispers and whimpers. Everything smells like wine, like blood, like wood-polish. Splinters in tongues: kneeling on the floorboards where the blood has spilt and licking, licking them raw and dry.

They pile on one another in the corner, huddled, trembling. Grantaire and Jehan do their best to comfort them. They might as well comfort a brood of spiders newly hatched from their mother’s sack. Jehan murmurs words of the Dhammapada. Gavroche buries himself under his sister’s arm.

The wind comes through the cracks in the walls, yowling. Everyone is afraid. They whisper questions. Does it always feel this way? Yes. Do you ever stop wanting? No. When will Enjolras return? Grantaire isn’t certain that he will. He smells wine in the air as thick as he smells blood, and he picks at his cuticles until they are deep, white, dry holes in his flesh. He tells them: soon.

Enjolras does return, leading four goats in tow. He comes back faster than anyone could have expected, but too slowly. He pushes the goats into the dark space without a word, and then he turns away.

\---

Grantaire snaps at Courfeyrac’s throat like an angry dog, pushing him back against the bricks. He can feel Enjolras’ heart stammering behind him, feel his warm chest and his cold hands. He won’t let any harm come to him.

“ _Back_ ,” he growls, shoving Courfeyrac in front of him again. The small man stumbles. Grantaire pities him, allows himself a tinge of guilt, but keeps his hand outstretched in his direction should he need to correct his path again.

He does, almost instantly.

“Courf!” he barks. Courfeyrac’s eyes are wide and fevered, darting at Enjolras’ neck, to the floor, to Grantaire’s wrists, back to Enjolras. “Get a grip on yourself.”

“I… can’t.”

“You must. There are eight of you. Jehan and I won’t be capable of holding the party if you cannot keep cool heads.”

Courfeyrac mumbles something incoherent, turning his back again and striding forward into the dark. Combeferre, tapping Grantaire’s shoulder briefly, streams past and goes after him. Grantaire glances back to catch Enjolras’ eye. Something flickers inside of it, momentarily. Grantaire looks away. He looks to Bossuet and Joly, and to the girl who he has learned is called Eponine, and to her brother, Gavroche. Bossuet has his arm around Joly’s shoulders and is trying to make Gavroche smile.

“I regret terribly my inability to have witnessed your heroic sacrifice to our country, mon chou, but Camille has informed me that it was most inspiring.”

“It truly was, Gav,” pipes Joly. “If only I myself had gone out with such a bang.”

“Well, I did,” says Bossuet. “The last I remember was a _bang_ , and then there was a cannonball right before my nose!”

Jehan is walking arm-in-arm with Bahorel and Feuilly, who are interrogating him in voices so soft that even Grantaire cannot make out what they are saying. He assumes nothing lighthearted; their heads are bowed too close together, and Bahorel has one fist balled up. Jehan says something that looks to be reassuring.

Combeferre and Courfeyrac have drifted back into the group. Grantaire finds himself in their midst, shoulder-to-shoulder in the dark alleyway.

“How far is the house?” says Combeferre, lowly.

“Not far now. A block. Less.”

“I would like to apologize to Enjolras,” says Courfeyrac, glancing halfway over his shoulder at the lonely figure of the man in question, plodding along behind them, “but I should prefer to do so in a more controlled space.”

 “That would be wise. But don’t despair too deeply, mon ami. Even the best of us is slave to his body’s whim, particularly when he hasn’t yet learnt its peculiar patterns and how best to manipulate them.”

Courfeyrac nods. His face is very sad and very white. It doesn’t suit him.

“Was it difficult for you, R?” asks Combeferre.

“Yes. It was the worst thing I’ve ever done. Comfort yourself, however, with the fact that within a handful of months, I found myself able to attend our meetings again—to be in the close presence of a dozen or more people. Also take comfort from the fact that for Jehan, it was much less difficult. Or, rather, that it was no less difficult, but that he found himself more naturally equipped to come to terms with the changes and to cope with them.”

“My classes,” says Combeferre, wistfully. “Perhaps I shall be able to return next semester.”

“You’ll take night classes,” says Grataire.

“Yes, night classes…”

“This is a tragedy,” Courfeyrac says, pulling at the collar of his shirt. “Not even able to go out in the daytime! How shall Marius and I take our brunches?”

“He shall need to call on you,” Grantaire says. “That is, indeed, under the assumption that he is still among the living.”

Courfeyrac shakes his head. It is not a loving gesture.

“You say such callous things, Big R. I wouldn’t forgive you were I not certain I should have felt Marius’ death.”

Grantaire wants to apologize, but he can’t seem to make his mouth unstick except to say, “Look. We are home.”

Joly is bustling past with the keys, giving him a light touch on the shoulder as he does so. He comes up the steps and fiddles open each of the three locks. Grantaire steps back and sweeps the party up over the threshold with grandiose gestures of his arms. The last man outside is Enjolras.

There are dark hollows under Grantaire’s eyes and sweat on the collar of his shirt. When he finds Enjolras unmoved, he drops his hands to his thighs and rubs his palms over his trousers as if trying to dry them, a quick smile twitching up on his lips.

“Well,” he says, indicating the door, “enter at thy will, O Fearless Leader.”

Enjolras swallows.

“Grantaire,” he says.

The smile on Grantaire’s face falls. He looks, suddenly, very tired.

“Yes?”

Enjolras looks at him for a long, long moment. And then he takes one step forward, smooths his thumbs over Grantaire’s stubbly jawline, and kisses him.


	21. Chapter 21

In the coming months, they find that sustaining a house full of vampires isn’t easy.

Grantaire stumbles blearily into the kitchen one evening at sunset only to find Joly, Bossuet, and Bahorel poring over a colored catalogue. He’d meant to step into the makeshift vivarium they’ve set up in the spare room and grab himself a rabbit or a hen to breakfast on, but instead he finds himself peering over Bossuet’s shoulder, looking down on a sprawling horizon lit with purple and orange.

“What is this?” he asks.

“America,” says Jehan. “Look at it.”

“I’m looking.”

“It’s big,” says Bossuet, unhelpfully.

“It looks like a whole lot of nothing.”

“It is. Miles of untouched land.”

Grantaire snorts, turning away and clapping Joly on the shoulder. “Untouched by whom? By us, yes. But I doubt the native population would use the same word.”

They make, in synchrony, vague hums of agreement. Bossuet twists his mouth and puts down the catalogue.

“R,” he says, seeing his friend’s movements across the kitchen, “vivarium’s empty.”

R throws back his head with a groan.

“Again?”

“We were unable to wrangle Marius into going to the market for us last evening. He’s been busy making wedding arrangements. What have you been doing?”

Grantaire jabs a thumb at the ceiling. Joly giggles.

“That explains where Enjolras was,” he says.

\---

“I want you.”

“You have me.”

“I want all of you.”

“I lay my heart at your feet.”

“I want…” Enjolras’ face is open and aching.

Grantaire strokes back a yellow curl from Enjolras’ cheekbone. He runs the pad of his thumb over Enjolras’ lips, brings it to his own and kisses it.

“I am yours,” Grantaire says.

“And I?” asks Enjolras. “Am I yours?”

When Grantaire is sad, Enjolras now knows, his eyes glass over. His thick lashes become the frames around mirrors reflecting the room surrounding. He looks quiet and humble as a deer facing down a rifle.

“For as long as you wish it,” Grantaire says.

“I wish it for forever.”

“Forever, then.”

Enjolras watches his hand as it’s lifted to Grantaire’s lips, as it’s kissed. He worms closer to him in their shared bed, crossing one of his ankles over Grantaire’s. It isn’t close enough, still. He tugs what’s his insistently closer and frowns as his fingers slip over a rib or two. Grantaire’s softness, the gentle rolls that his stomach makes when he sits up in bed, the plump curves of his thighs—these are all things that Enjolras had gotten so used to, curled up here with him in those first few months. Their disappearance has happened so gradually that he hardly noticed it happening until it had happened.

It is true, they are running out of money. More than that: the ten... the ten _whatever they are_ that live in this house are sucking the surrounding areas dry of livestock faster than livestock can be produced and sold. This isn’t sustainable. He has seen Combeferre murmuring in corners recently with Joly—he has heard fierce Eponine verbally claw the others down so that Gavroche can get a chance to feed—he knows that the house will fall if something isn’t done soon.

“Shhh,” Grantaire soothes.

“I haven’t said a word.”

“Your brow. I tell its furrows to quit their discourse, no matter how prettily they sit.”

He can’t help but smile a faint smile. He reaches up and traces a finger over Grantaire’s own well-lined forehead. Grantaire laughs at him, the crow’s feet crinkling up around his eyes.

Forever. Enjolras regrets that that word can’t last for longer than he knows it will.

\---

Marius is on honeymoon.

Enjolras dons Grantaire’s heavy cloak and hides his face beneath the hood. He takes a cart to a farmhouse by Rouen. It takes the day. He returns with an entire cartload of turkeys, two dozen of them, their legs bound and wings clipped. He carries them into the house two at a time, their black eyes like tiny holes, until the cart is full, and the baffled driver can be paid well and dismissed.

He locks the three locks on the door, which no longer seem superfluous, and looks around at the hall. The turkeys are squabbling, clucking pathetically on the tiles. Enjolras chooses the three largest and goes upstairs to Grantaire.

\---

He loves him like this. Warm and full and sleepy. This is how he remembers him from another life, when he watched him sit in the dark back corner of the Musain, lolled back in his chair, eyelids weighted by wine but eyes glistening sharp and bright beneath them—all honey-smooth voice and expansive gestures and wide smiles.

He’s different now; older in a way that’s impossible to see but that you can feel. He doesn’t laugh so loudly. His motions are more spare, more meaningful. Instead of snorting at Enjolras’ suggestions to put down the bottle, he shuts his eyes, quivering, against Enjolras’ hard gaze when he catches him watching the slide of the syringe into his veins.

But like this, satiated to the point of giddiness on the blood in his stomach, the new pulse roaring through his veins, eyes alight—here, he is young again and so familiar that it hurts Enjolras’ heart to look at him.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” Grantaire laughs, each new iteration of the phrase landing another kiss of his lips on a different spot on Enjolras’ neck. “I love you. I love touching you. I love kissing you. I love being able to hold you—” He slots their hips together, licks a stripe up Enjolras’ throat to his ear. Enjolras moans. “—and to touch you and to kiss you without hesitation. Without feeling I might put you in danger. I love this. When I have food in my belly and can feel human again with you.”

“I love you,” Enjolras whispers.

Grantaire makes a noise like he’s on the verge of death.

“Say it again.”

“I love you.”

“Again.”

“I love you. I love you. I love you…”


	22. Chapter 22

They grow thinner, all of them, and thinner still. Combeferre’s cheekbones jut like knives from his face. When Jehan neglects a cravat, his clavicles dip and rise visibly with his breath.

One night, Grantaire finds Courfeyrac at the front door, trying to pry it open.

“What are you doing?”

“Why is the door locked from the outside?” Courfeyrac counters.

“Because I’ve locked it.”

“You’ve locked us in.”

“I meant to.”

“ _You’re_ allowed out.”

“Because I’m not trying to get out.”

Courfeyrac gives in, turns around, faces him.

“If I weren’t so civilized,” he says, “I’d go out through a window. This is a violation of our—”

“We haven’t got rights anymore,” Grantaire says. “We’re dead, and you’d be a murderer if I let you.”

Courfeyrac blanches. His eyes are sunken in, dark under their lids. It’s not a good look for him.

“How dare you.”

“I’d say the same about myself in a moment. It’s only by Joly and Bossuet’s good will that I’ve retained any semblance of dignity.”

“I would never… I was going to fly off the countryside for the night. I am hungry. We are all hungry. R, you know me better than to suggest that I am capable of—”

“I killed Prouvaire,” says Grantaire, flatly. “You are capable.”

This seems to strike Courfeyrac right between the eyes. He closes his mouth. And it takes a moment, but he nods.

He doesn’t try to get out again.

\---

Marius brings rations every third night. They disappear within the hour and are never enough to satisfy: the linings of everyone’s pockets are thinning. Enjolras, Courfeyrac, Combeferre’s parents think they are dead. Neither Feuilly nor Bahorel has worked in months. Eponine and Gavroche have arrived with nothing, and with no one who to miss them.  Joly has given up his house-calls. Bossuet has resigned himself to never finishing his law degree—he takes this with good humor, joking that it’s the best thing to come of “all this.”

So incited, Grantaire launches into a strange, uncharacteristic flurry of activity while Enjolras watches.

He wakes one morning to find him hurtling around the dark room like a comet made of black curls and white undershirt fabric and swarthy skin, slashing open the dusty boxes which have sat in the corners for months. As Enjolras watches, Grantaire pauses, keels back, and lets out an inhumanely loud sneeze.

“Pascal?”

Grantaire looks up.

“Ah!” he says. “Sorry to have woken you.”

“What are you doing?”

“Painting,” says Grantaire, as though this is obvious, and goes back to slashing boxes.

Enjolras sits up, the sheets falling to pool around his waist.

“What time is it?” he asks, rubbing his eyes. “It seems we’ve just fallen asleep.”

“I don’t know,” says Grantaire. He lifts a wooden crate from one of the boxes and his eyes brighten—he seems to have found what he’s been looking for. Under the squeaky lid is something that makes him let out an equally squeaky noise of glee.

“What is it? What are you doing?” asks Enjolras, squinting through the light of the single candle on the bedside table.

“My oils! Not that kind. Paints! Go back to bed.”

“ _You_ go back to bed.”

“Hush. I’m painting.”

“You’re not. You’re hurtling about the room like a comet.”

“I haven’t nearly the fire in me to be a comet, mon ange—that’s you,” says Grantaire, distractedly, as he thumbs through the paints in his box.

“Mmph.”

Enjolras rolls over and falls back asleep.

In the morning, he wishes he hadn’t.

It’s what wakes him up—or, at least, what wakes him fully. When he opens his eyes, there is a man standing across the room from him, or so he thinks in the moment between waking and sitting up. A flash of blonde hair, the curl of a shoulder—no, not a man. The rough beginnings of one. An unfinished painting.

Grantaire’s coiled around him in their bed, his bare skin radiating heat like the glass body of an oil lamp, one arm throw around Enjolras’ waist. It slides off as Enjolras sits up, looking across the room at himself.

The painting, in its beginnings, is all shades of gold and deep blue layered over charcoal: the imagined candlelight illuminating sections of Enjolras’ soft sleeping face, of his half-parted lips, of his rose-petal eyelids. One hand is clutching the fabric of his pillowcase, knuckles taut with the tension of a dream. And Enjolras has never paid much attention to the way he looks, never cared much for mirrors because, to him, they showed only the sharp outlines of his father’s set chin and his mother’s sad eyes, and he’s always wanted to think himself more than that, more than the blood that runs in his veins—and here… Here, he is. Grantaire has set him here in a splash of light against a dark background, preserved him in a moment of rest marred only by a clenched fist.

“Haven’t got your nose right yet—” says a soft, husky voice from beside him.

“ _You_ did that?” He regrets the way the words sound the moment they fly out of his mouth, but he means it. Grantaire is complete the way Enjolras knows him: warm, solid, reckless but unshakeable where it counts, oftentimes glib but always clever, derisive but never purposefully hard-hearted. This is something else altogether. Something soft. Something gentle.

Grantaire laughs—a self-deprecating sound.

“It’s not yet finished,” he says.

“No, I mean… It’s…”

Enjolras shakes his head, sinks back into the sheets, and curls under Grantaire’s waiting arms, pressing his forehead to Grantaire’s chest. His fingers brush his shoulder-blade. They breathe together.

“I love you,” Enjolras says.

Grantaire’s still laughing, quietly, incredulous now. “I love you too.”

“Are you going to sell it?”

“Yes. If anyone will buy it.”

Enjolras hums, his nose against Grantaire’s pectoral muscle.

“The buyer will be lucky. It is beautiful.”

Grantaire’s lips alight on Enjolras’ forehead.

“Because it’s of you,” he says.

“Painted by you.”

Grantaire doesn’t say anything, but Enjolras can feel the blush rising to his throat, the pause and tremor in his fingers on Enjolras’ back, the stutter in his breath. Enjolras makes a mental note to compliment him more often.

They stay like that for a long time, soft and warm.

“I’m glad we’re alive,” Enjolras murmurs after a while, when he’s just on the verge of falling back asleep.

“I’m glad too,” says Grantaire, and pulls him closer.


End file.
